The Wikimedia Foundation's Legal Stance
The Wikimedia Foundation is staking out a middle ground in a group of landmark AI copyright cases, pushing courts to legally protect large language models training on copyrighted work, but not chatbots regurgitating that work to users. An overly black-and-white ruling, it says, could either deprive Wikipedians of useful AI-based tools or endanger the open web.
Wikipedia’s operator says a bad AI copyright ruling could threaten the open web
In the New York Times case against OpenAI, the Wikimedia Foundation says training AI should be fair use, but regurgitating articles should not.
In an amicus brief filed, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia weighed in on a set of lawsuits pitting publishers including The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft, taking neither side. Wikimedia is concerned that the parties’ positions in this case push for overbroad and simplified applications of the fair use doctrine around AI, the organization says in its legal filing. A nuance-free victory for publishers, it fears, could let copyright holders gatekeep even innovative and transformative uses of their work. On the other hand, a victory for AI companies could constitute a green light to snub licensing terms and fragment the flow of knowledge between human authors and audiences.
Wikimedia is concerned that the parties’ positions in this case push for overbroad and simplified applications of the fair use doctrine.
Balancing AI Training and Community Sustainability
The ruling could be existential for Wikipedia. Wikimedia websites have become one of the most critical sources of data for all artificial intelligence and machine learning training, the company says in the filing. But these same systems siphon away visitors, undermining the communities that maintain these sites. Wikimedia argues that they are also violating copyright: Services like ChatGPT reproduce text that is licensed freely under Creative Commons, it says, but do not adhere to the terms of that license.
At the same time, it says, the large language models that power these systems are useful to Wikipedia by helping editors fight vandalism, detect copyright violations and doxxing, and look for articles that need improvement.
A ruling that does not apply fair use principles carefully could threaten the sustainability of free knowledge, and stifle the development of open source technologies, ultimately impacting access to information for everyone in both cases, Wikimedia Foundation general counsel Stephen LaPorte says in a statement. The court needs to understand that Wikipedia is created through a collaborative process that requires a strong foundation of open and accessible human knowledge to thrive.
A ruling that does not apply fair use principles carefully could threaten the sustainability of free knowledge.
Proposing a Compromise on Fair Use
The Times argues for a more expansive definition of fair use as it applies to large language models, alleging that OpenAI infringed on its copyright by scraping its website to build training datasets. OpenAI and Microsoft both contend that using large language models constitutes fair use. OpenAI has stated that regurgitating work is a rare bug, while Microsoft has cited expert analysis indicating that Copilot rarely reproduces full sentences from news content used to ground the model.
Wikimedia proposes a compromise where scraping websites and using copyrighted works to pre-train models without a license should constitute fair use when they provide something new and different from the original sources. However, if models pull copies of material in response to user queries and deliver it to users while supplanting engagement with original works, that should require a license because the output substitutes for the original work.
In those cases, Wikimedia says that AI companies should respect licensing requirements to use such information. For Wikipedia, this would mean crediting the original source of information under its Creative Commons license, which requires any remix or adaptations to remain under that same license.
We are taking a position in this case to defend the free and open human knowledge that Wikipedia depends on, Wikimedia CEO Bernadette Meehan says in a statement. Expanding access to knowledge through AI is a powerful goal, but it must respect the people, contributors, and communities that make reliable knowledge possible.
