Wikimedia files brief in AI copyright case
What happened
On 30 October 2026, the Wikimedia Foundation filed a court brief in the AI copyright case brought by publishers including The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft. The foundation said it takes no side, arguing that courts should apply fair use carefully, and proposed a compromise: crawling websites and pre-training large language models on copyrighted works should count as fair use provided the output differs from the original, but models that reproduce original text in response to user queries and substitute for readers' access to the work should meet licensing requirements.
Written by AI from the reports · updated 2 h ago
Timeline
Follow the reports to see the event from each side.
- The Verge · AIWikipedia’s operator says a bad AI copyright ruling could threaten the open web
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 (LLMs) training on copyrighted work - but not chatbots regurgitating that work to users.
Heat of this event
Not enough continuous observations yet to draw a trend.