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Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. in c/wikipedia@lemmy.world
Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. in c/wikipedia@lemmy.world
[–] [S] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

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?

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    • 42
    Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. (www.quippd.com)
     

    Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/wikipedia@lemmy.world/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.

    10
    Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. Law (www.quippd.com)
     

    Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/wikipedia@lemmy.world/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.

    Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. in c/wikipedia@lemmy.world
    [–] [S] 1 point 3 months ago (4 children)

    To have legal standing for a letter, what you're asking to cease and desist needs to be illegal.

    FWIW, that isn't true - I didn't post the letter, but I got a C&D from SoFi for this post. Clearly I had done nothing illegal.

    WMF isn't Nintendo or Hatchette; you need way more than $296M to pursue all that, not to mention $200M of that is the standard practice of keeping a 12 months' rain fund in case something massive happens to current revenue.

    They can't defend the contributors, but they can hire a union busting law firm to keep their staff in check. Got it.

    we know that these violations exploiting the commons are going to happen regardless of whether Enterprise exists

    We don't know that because WMF hasn't bothered to try defending contributors. Instead, they created a glide path for the pirates taking advantage of them.

    so they might as well make the exploiters pay for it to help maintain the commons' infrastructure.

    I think it is interesting you say that WMF is being "exploited" yet you believe that they don't have any standing for the damages they have experienced.

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    • Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. in c/wikipedia@lemmy.world
    [–] [S] 1 point 3 months ago (6 children)

    Send one to whom? A WHOIS of the Brazilian IP that turns out to be a residential proxy? Anonymous scraping for LLMs is a problem all over the Internet without a solution (save Anubis). There's a reason all the big companies have went for Cloudflare instead of any lawsuits, which you'd hear in the news.

    I know individuals that have been unmasked in torrent swarms and have had their ISP cancel their service due to that. The idea that Wikimedia's hands are powerless to send a Cease and Desist to ISPs to warn and ban their customers for scraping is hilarious.

    Again, they have $296M in reserves. WMF can send a letter.

    They're not even sure if they have the standing; they've looked at that question

    But that isn't what you linked to says; the word standing doesn't appear in the text, nor do they seem to explore that. Thanks for the reference, but it doesn't actually support your argument.

    I am simply representing the perspective of contributors as a signatory myself, and as a developer who makes API calls to Wikipedia. "Our content is always free to use, but our infrastructure is not" sums it up nicely and Wikimedia Enterprise keeps the free infrastructure good.

    As I responded to another commenter:

    I also don't know how much pointing out that this access has been granted for other users matters - the current CEO very clearly states that this was built to support the scraping use cases; Wikimedia knows that the scrapers are violating the licenses with every derivative work created not licensed reciprocally, and designed the feature to make that happen faster.

    Enabling non-violating use cases don't erase the violating ones.

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    • Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. in c/wikipedia@lemmy.world
    [–] [S] 1 point 3 months ago (8 children)

    This omits how scrapers and crawlers would have been getting the corpus for free without that, profiteering and clogging up the tubes that bring you Wikipedia and tons of amazing applications that rely on it.

    I didn't know that I had to preemptively defend the Foundation.

    The reason I don't think that that is particularly relevant is because these companies are violating the license that Wikimedia projects are distributed under. WMF has $296M in reserves. They couldn't send a Cease and Desist for the server load?

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    • Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. in c/foss@beehaw.org
    [–] [S] 29 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    They did, but that was for contributions. They still sold access to the encyclopedia to big tech so they could train on it to create slop (in violation of the licenses that Wikipedia is licensed under).

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    • Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. in c/foss@beehaw.org
    109
    Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. (www.quippd.com)
     

    Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/technology@beehaw.org/t/4224376

    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.

    48
    Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. (www.quippd.com)
     

    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.

    61
    Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. (www.quippd.com)
     

    Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/wikipedia@lemmy.world/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.

    47
    Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. (www.quippd.com)
     

    Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/wikipedia@lemmy.world/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.

    130
    Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. (www.quippd.com)
     

    Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/wikipedia@lemmy.world/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.

    37
    Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. (www.quippd.com)
     

    Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/wikipedia@lemmy.world/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.

    268
    Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. (www.quippd.com)
     

    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.

    AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way in c/foss@beehaw.org
    [–] [S] 1 point 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    I know what copyleft licenses are about, that was covered in the post - if you read it. If you are saying that you are making long comments without reading the post, great I guess, but not super interesting (to me).

    I'm not really interested in getting into an argument around license choice because I wasn't advocating for any particular license (like you seem to be).

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    • AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way in c/foss@beehaw.org
    AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way in c/foss@beehaw.org
    [–] [S] 1 point 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    I think the reimplementation stuff is a separate question because the argument for it working looks a lot stronger, and because it doesn't have anything to do with the source material having LLM output in it. Also if this method holds as legally valid, it's going to be easier to just do that than justify copying code directly (which would probably have to only be copies of the explicitly generated parts of the code, requiring figuring out how to replace the rest), which means it won't matter whether some portion of it was generated.

    Is it a separate question, though?

    Both works are copyrighted, one is just copyrighted as "all rights reserved" (our leaked commercial code) and the rest is licensed as LGPL. We're putting both pieces of code inside the LLM and then asking the LLM to make a new version.

    What makes the action of leaking different from the act of putting it on the web? Rights are reserved in either case.

    If they aren't entirely generated, you can't make a full fork, and why would a partial fork be useful?

    Well, people are contributing to copyleft codebases expecting that when people build on their work, that work (the derivative works) are also licensed in the same way. You don't need to fork for the value to be lost. People expected virality to be part of their contribution, and clearly the new derivative works are partially non-copyleft.

    Beyond that, as more of the codebase is LLM produced, the less of it is protected by the copyleft license, until we have a ship of Theseus situation where the codebase is available, but no longer copyleft. That is clearly not what was intended by e.g. the GPL. Just look at the Stallman quote in post.

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    • AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way in c/foss@beehaw.org
    [–] [S] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    ianal but does it even work like that? Is there any specific reason to think it does? I don't believe you really get credit for purity and fairness vibes in the legal system. Same goes for the idea that code where it is ambiguous whether it is AI output could be considered public domain, seems kind of implausible, is there actually any reason to think the law works that way? If it did, then any copyrighted work not accompanied by proof of human authorship would be at risk, uncharacteristic for a system focused on giving big copyright holders what they want without trouble.

    I'm mostly just playing along with your thought experiment. As I said, we know that projects are already accepting LLM code into projects that are nominally copyleft.

    There is no way, leaks happen, big tech companies have massive influence, a situation where their code falls into the public domain as soon as the public gets their hands on it just isn't realistic.

    If that is the case, is chardet 7.0.0 a derivative work of chardet, or is it a public domain LLM work? The whole LLM project is fraught with questions like these, but it seems that the vendors at least are counting on not copying leaked software and instead copying open source code that is publicly hosted.

    Why is it okay to strip copyright from open source works but not from leaked closed source works?

    We know that Disney is suing to protect its works - if it is true that LLM outputs are transformative, they should lose, as should any vendor whose leaked code was "transformed" by an LLM.

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    • AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way in c/linux@programming.dev
    [–] [S] 1 point 7 months ago

    But any source code leak is also open sourcing in that world.

    I don't see how that helps free software, though. Those programmers got paid. Volunteers didn't.

    It ends up with a weird reverse robin hood situation. LLM vendors steal from the poor, sell that to the rich. Do the rich give back? Only if it is stolen from them.

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    • 73
    AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way (www.quippd.com)
     

    TL;DR: The advent of AI based, LLM coding applications like Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT have prompted maintainers to experiment with integrating LLM contributions into open source codebases. This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable. This means that as more uncopyrightable LLM outputs are integrated into nominally open source codebases, value leaks out of the project, since the open source licences are not operative on public domain code. That means that the public domain, AI generated code can be reused without attribution, and in the case of copyleft licences - can even be used in closed source projects.

    62
    AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way (www.quippd.com)
     

    TL;DR: The advent of AI based, LLM coding applications like Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT have prompted maintainers to experiment with integrating LLM contributions into open source codebases. This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable. This means that as more uncopyrightable LLM outputs are integrated into nominally open source codebases, value leaks out of the project, since the open source licences are not operative on public domain code. That means that the public domain, AI generated code can be reused without attribution, and in the case of copyleft licences - can even be used in closed source projects.

    20
    AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way (www.quippd.com)
     

    TL;DR: The advent of AI based, LLM coding applications like Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT have prompted maintainers to experiment with integrating LLM contributions into open source codebases. This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable. This means that as more uncopyrightable LLM outputs are integrated into nominally open source codebases, value leaks out of the project, since the open source licences are not operative on public domain code. That means that the public domain, AI generated code can be reused without attribution, and in the case of copyleft licences - can even be used in closed source projects.

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