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.
if a C&D doesn't accuse you of anything illegal, then it absolutely cannot compel you under any circumstance:
This doesn't have to mean criminal penalties. If WMF simply tells the scrapers that they are no longer authorized to access their systems, they can litigate against companies who continue to breach their request to discontinue scraping. That can be a civil action.
I can't imagine that Wikimedia is somehow required to feed the LLMs, and that they cannot simply request that they stop. You and I may not get a lot of traction there, but $263M definitely ought to make it possible to hire a lawyer to defend against (now) unauthorized access.
We don't know that because WMF hasn't bothered to try defending contributors.
Very false. Bot detection and blocking efforts have always been pretty documented
I don't see how bot detection shows that WMF is trying to defend contributors' IP.
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.
Before Wikimedia Enterprise they weren't getting paid and the LLM companies may have had to depend on residential proxies -- if the bot detection you mention was successful, for example. The glide path allows Enterprise customers to not experience rate limits or rely on shoddy infrastructure. Clearly, it's better to not be in the shadows, if you are trying to evade detection.
PS: Were they using the API or were they scraping? If they were using the API, why couldn't WMF just revoke their keys?