TL;DR: In the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has fired several union organizers, including those that worked on the Community Tech team - a team dedicated to building features for the volunteer community that edits Wikipedia.

Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/4218790

TL;DR: In the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has fired several union organizers, including those that worked on the Community Tech team - a team dedicated to building features for the volunteer community that edits Wikipedia.

As the Wiki Workers Union tries to get the Wikimedia Foundation to recognize their union, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time that the Foundation has worked against the community.

Wikimedia Enterprise is a betrayal of the volunteer movement community of Wikipedia editors, as the Wikimedia Foundation is providing privileged access to big tech AI companies to the Wikipedia corpus - a body of work that the Foundation does not own.

Movement volunteer communities contributed to Wikipedia under copyleft licenses - licenses that work to ensure that the work remains free (as in speech). The big tech AI companies do not license derivative works under copyleft licenses and often do not even attribute where the works came from.

This means that volunteers are working for big tech for free, and the Wikimedia Foundation is selling privileged access to that free labor.

It is against that backdrop that the current unionization struggle unfolds.

  • antonim@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    A better argument than what - that they are openly violating the licenses under which the encyclopedia is distributed?

    That’s a bit more convincing.

    this is a highly unsettled question, and there are multiple cases in litigation today

    I followed Kadrey v. Meta a little bit, and the conclusion was in favour of the training being fair use. What are the other ongoing cases?

    • melfie@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      When there’s a dispute, courts consider the following four issues in deciding whether a use is fair use:

      1. why the party used the copyrighted material (for instance, for commercial versus educational purposes)
      2. whether the copyrighted work is informational or for entertainment
      3. how much of the copyrighted work the party used, and
      4. whether and how the use affects the market for or value of the copyrighted work.
      1. Commercial
      2. Informational
      3. All of it
      4. Definitely does

      Based on this, not sure fair use holds up that well, but I’m not a lawyer.

      • antonim@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Regarding the first point, AI companies usually claim their work is scientific/educational. #3 can be responded to by claiming they actually use none of the original work, i.e. they don’t reproduce any of it; they liken training AI to learning from the materials, and usimg knowledge from some book isn’t just ‘fair use’, it’s the expected use of the book.

        It’s mostly bullshit and sophistry, of course, but I’m afraid they will win in most of these cases since they have more money to dump into top-tier lawyers.

        • melfie@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          There’s a good chance you’re right, unfortunately. I guess copyright laws in general need revamping.