Dutch authors and publicists, represented by journalists’ union NVJ, writers’ union Auteursbond, and copyright protection organisation Lira, have threatened legal action against Meta for using their work to train AI models without permission.

Meta has until Friday to react to a summons to stop the practice and come to an agreement about paying for using the work.

If the case against Meta goes ahead, it will be one of many taking place across the world. A court in the United States last year acknowledged that Meta had used illegal shadow libraries, such as LibGen and Anna’s Archive, to train its language model LLama.

These libraries also contain Dutch material, which is why the organisations think Meta has a case to answer.

“Without our work, there would be no AI,” NVJ spokesman Thomas Bruring told the Financieele Dagblad. “A fair level of pay is necessary for journalists, writers, and translators to continue their work.”

The three organisations emphasised they are not trying to stop the use of artificial intelligence. “We are not against AI models,” Lira director Hanneke Verschuur said. “But it can’t be right that companies expecting to earn billions do this while destroying the economic and creative position of the creators,” she told the paper.

OpenAI, Anthropic and Google also use texts from Dutch writers to train models without asking and paying for the privilege and the organisations are not ruling out more court cases in an effort to win a collective fee.

“But to achieve this, we need transparency. We want to know exactly which material has been used and what the revenue models are, so we can come to a fair payment system,” Verschuur said.

Dutch newspapers and other media companies, united in NPD Nieuwsmedia, are not part of the legal action. They represent the employers of many journalists and own the copyright to their work.

Director Herman Wolswinkel said he “understands legal boundaries are being set”. For now, the organisation is prioritising licensing deals with tech companies, he said. “But if that doesn’t work out well, we don’t rule out legal action.”