The Wikimedia Foundation has entered the legal battle between The New York Times, OpenAI, and Microsoft. The organization behind Wikipedia filed an amicus brief asking the court to adopt a balanced approach in the high-stakes copyright lawsuit.
A Third Path for AI and Copyright
The lawsuit centers on whether OpenAI and Microsoft violated copyright law by using published material from The New York Times to train their artificial intelligence models. The newspaper argues that tech companies should not have unrestricted access to published content, while OpenAI and Microsoft maintain that training models on public data is essential for technological progress and qualifies as fair use.
The Wikimedia Foundation proposes a middle ground in its brief. The organization warns that an overly restrictive interpretation of fair use could stifle technological innovation. At the same time, it cautions that ruling in favor of broad, blanket fair use could create a closed internet where public knowledge suffers due to a scarcity of accessible secondary sources.
Specific Applications of Fair Use
The proposed alternative supports fair use for two distinct applications. This covers specific model training scenarios alongside a method known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). RAG improves large language model outputs by pulling information from authoritative external knowledge bases outside the initial training data. Nevertheless, the foundation opposes RAG if a language model reproduces existing articles without proper credit.
Regarding model training, the foundation contends that copying copyrighted material should qualify as fair use when it involves “training LLMs that are something new and different from the original sources.” Wikipedia stands as a primary high-quality dataset utilized widely for training such models.
“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 stated. “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 summary judgment in the case is anticipated soon. This lawsuit represents one of numerous similar legal challenges moving through the courts that could establish a significant precedent for the industry.
