At the end of October, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other open knowledge projects, filed its friend of the court opinion (amicus brief) with the Southern District Court of New York in In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation (12 combined lawsuits against OpenAI), urging the court to protect the open knowledge ecosystem in its decision. The most well-known of the 12 cases is The New York Times Co. v Microsoft and OpenAI). This is a key case in intellectual property law, as the court will rule on whether the use of copyrighted content by artificial intelligence (AI) companies to develop large language models (LLMs) constitutes fair use.
The Foundation's concern is the general protection of open knowledge, not to side with OpenAI, Microsoft, the New York Times, or any of the other parties involved in the lawsuit. "We are taking a position in this case to defend the free and open human knowledge that Wikipedia depends on. Expanding access to knowledge through AI is a powerful goal, but it must respect the people, contributors, and communities that make reliable knowledge possible. Finding this balance is both a mutual benefit and a shared responsibility for the entire information ecosystem," said Wikimedia CEO Bernadette Meehan.
Regarding model training, the Foundation’s court filing offers an alternative position that applies fair use and argues that using copyrighted content should be considered fair if it is being used for training LLMs that are something new and different from the original sources. In this case, there would not be a requirement to meet any copyright licensing terms. It particularly singles out RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and includes any newer technologies that may appear.
Further, it wants the court to ensure that uncredited use of the content hosted in Wikipedia is limited to model training, and that any use of the content for RAG and newer techniques that serve a similar "grounding" purpose must result in proper attribution under its Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Also, scraping of Wikimedia projects must be done sustainably and in line with its public API rate limits or through its Enterprise API offerings.
Learn more details about the amicus brief at Stephen LaPorte's, blog post here (LaPorte is General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation), and read the Foundation's press release here .