{"id":5693,"date":"2026-09-09T19:21:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T02:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5693"},"modified":"2026-09-09T19:21:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T02:21:21","slug":"review-the-commons-captured-by-michael-j-bommarito-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5693","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Commons Captured by Michael J. Bommarito II"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Commons<\/a>I\u2019ve had an eye out for a history of Wikipedia for some time, and the other day stumbled across The Commons Captured<\/em>, by Michael J. Bommarito II. And yes, it does provide a reasonably detailed history going back to Wikipedia\u2019s origins in 2001. But that\u2019s not really the book\u2019s focus, as the title suggests. <\/p>\n

In addition to the history of Wikipedia, the book provides a history of what Richard Stallman created and called \u201ccopyleft:\u201d a system of licensing that provides intellectual property for free, with the caveat that all derivative works maintain the price tag of $0.00. It\u2019s the Creative Commons, along with ShareAlike, generally abbreviated as CC BY-SA, now at version 3.0. (See this link<\/a> for details.) I released my Free Pascal from Square One<\/em> ebook under CC BY-SA 3.0. From a height, this means that you can share it, pass it around, and borrow parts of it for your own projects, but you cannot sell it<\/em>. This is the license that supposedly surrounds Wikipedia and its (now) seven million articles. And it worked great for over 20 years.<\/p>\n

Then alluvasudden AI happened, and everything changed.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the book\u2019s focus: How AI took advantage of Wikipedia\u2019s freeness, and how the powers that operate Wikipedia broke Creative Commons and licensed Wikipedia\u2019s content to AI companies\u2026for money.<\/p>\n

Really. Wikipedia\u2019s operators created the Wikimedia Foundation as a licensed nonprofit. AI tech firms had begun training their AIs on Wikipedia\u2019s content almost as soon as there were AIs, without paying or asking permission. Hey, reading Wikipedia is free, right? So why not? Well, because the AI companies sold access to their AIs to the public for money. And having digested Wikipedia\u2019s seven million articles, those AIs began answering questions from AI firms\u2019 customers using Wikipedia\u2019s content. <\/p>\n

The Wikimedia Foundation created a licensing system that offered a license to AI firms. Many (but not all) of the AI firms paid money\u2014big<\/em> money\u2014for the right to train their AIs on Wikipedia\u2019s content. Granted, it takes money for servers to host something as big and as popular as Wikipedia. But the Foundation brought in way<\/em> more cash from licensing AI training than it needed to keep the servers pumping.<\/p>\n

The real bummer is that Wikipedia\u2019s articles are written and edited by volunteers who pocket nothing for their time and effort. And none of that license money ended up in those volunteers\u2019 pockets. None. Also, as more people hooked up with AI, fewer people went up to read Wikipedia itself.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the end of the story? Well, the story hasn\u2019t ended. Michael Bommarito sketched out four possible outcomes of the AI licensing issue over the coming years, but he isn\u2019t optimistic, and I won\u2019t summarize those here. Buy the book.<\/p>\n

What I found most fascinating was the gray haze that still surrounds the issue of what AIs store, how they store it, and whether or not training AIs falls under the legal category of fair use. Wikipedia is not copyrighted, but copylefted, so that shouldn\u2019t matter. But\u2026the Foundation is selling Wikipedia access to the AI firms, who sell access to their trained AIs to a (mostly) paying public. So much for copyleft.<\/p>\n

The book is very well-written but dense, and demands close attention. I found it puzzling that the book makes no mention of Justapedia<\/a>, which is a very good Wikipedia fork that I use and may someday (as time permits) attempt to write some articles for. The book does mention Grokipedia<\/a> and Everipedia, though not at length. So I\u2019ll keep looking.<\/p>\n

But if you\u2019re interested in the emerging legal issues surrounding AI training, this is definitely the book to read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve had an eye out for a history of Wikipedia for some time, and the other day stumbled across The Commons Captured, by Michael J. Bommarito II. And yes, it does provide a reasonably detailed history going back to Wikipedia\u2019s origins in 2001. But that\u2019s not really the book\u2019s focus, as the title suggests. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[118,156,213],"class_list":["post-5693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-ai","tag-copyright","tag-wikipedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5693"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5694,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5693\/revisions\/5694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}