'Two ways' of pursuing legal case against Meta, says former Waitrose boss Mark Price

Speaking to The Bookseller, the former managing director of Waitrose said he has been advised by counsel that "there are two routes for recompense" available to authors who believe their books were used for the training of Meta's Llama via the LibGen shadow library.

The company has denied any unlawful use of copyrighted works for the training of its AI models. "We respect third-party intellectual property rights and believe our use of information to train AI models is consistent with existing law," a Meta spokesperson said.

Price explained that the first way would be to understand whether books taken from LibGen have been "ingested and processed within the UK", which he claimed would determine if there is "a UK case against Meta".