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.
As I said, laws and ethics often get to different conclusions. They don't have legal standing because there was no legal wrong, even if it is ethically abject.
if a C&D doesn't accuse you of anything illegal, then it absolutely cannot compel you under any circumstance:
A cease and desist letter puts a person or business on notice that they're engaging in an activity that violates your rights, and if they don't stop, you'll pursue legal action.
In addition to saving time and money, a cease and desist letter is a good way to track communications you've sent to the other side. Sending a letter provides evidence that the party had notice of the wrongful behavior but continued to engage in it.
—https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-a-cease-and-desist-letter.html
Since Van Buren v. United States, scraping no longer falls under the powerful CFAA enforcement, and (I hope) the United States can no longer prosecute Aaron Swartz and seek seven years' bars for scraping.
but they can hire a union busting law firm
Yeah that is absolutely horrible behavior; I agree with you entirely on the union parts which more people should know. (My post highlighting the hiring here has received surprisingly little attention, so I'm glad yours blew up.)
However, that's only at least $100k and at most a million, and to pursue a single entity. Mass-identifying ISPs from swarms of traffic-you-also-have-to-identify to which you write a letter each like Nintendo does with torrent swarms requires a lot more. It's much easier and economical to simply put a rate limit on it and creating paid access on an isolated stack.
hasn't bothered to try
Very false. Bot detection and blocking efforts have always been pretty documented (e.g. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_Platform/Data_Lake/Data_Issues/2026-06-10_Nov_2025_spike_in_bot_traffic , https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/5462/?filter=ve98KgxXcKmC , https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_Platform/Data_Lake/Traffic/Bot_detection). They have only intensified since 2022 (https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/03/26/quo-vadis-crawlers-progress-and-whats-next-on-safeguarding-our-infrastructure/image-1919/). Last year, they spent "~600–700 SRE FTE-hours" on reactive scraper defense by hand ("firefighting").
Instead, they created a glide path for the pirates taking advantage of them.
Before Wikimedia Enterprise it was way easier. Again, API Access was, until very recently, unlimited and free. I'm not sure how Enterprise is the glide path here.