Wikimedia's amicus brief in the publishers' cases against OpenAI and Microsoft proposes a split on fair use

2026-10-29 · part of Copyright Exposure

What happened

The Verge reported that the Wikimedia Foundation, in an amicus brief in publishers' lawsuits including The New York Times's against OpenAI and Microsoft, took neither side and proposed that pre-training on copyrighted works without a license be fair use when it provides something new and different, while models that deliver copies of material in response to user queries, supplanting readers' engagement with the originals, should require a license — The Verge notes that OpenAI and Microsoft both contend that using LLMs constitutes fair use, and that The Times argues for a more expansive definition of fair use as it applies to LLMs. (The Verge) Claims: kat-claim-fca682080373

Sources 1

The Verge theverge.com high 0.882 generally reliable

Credibility ratings combine two public datasets: Lin et al. 2023, PNAS Nexus 2(9):pgad286 (CC BY 4.0) for the domain-quality score, and Wikipedia's perennial-sources list (CC BY-SA 4.0) for the reliability tier. A rating describes an outlet's general record, never this particular article. Unrated means absent from those datasets — not a judgement.

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