SellKnowledgeBaseToAI
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Protection beyond copyright

Is a company wiki a trade secret, and does licensing it end that?

Updated

An internal wiki is often protected less by copyright than by being kept secret, and a licence for AI training has to be written so that it stays that way.

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What makes it a trade secret

18 U.S.C. 1839 requires that the owner has taken reasonable measures to keep the information secret and that it has value from not being generally known. The UK's 2018 regulations ask for commercial value because it is secret and reasonable steps to keep it so.

Source: Knowledge base legal protection

The database right in the UK

The 1997 regulations give a database right where there was substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents, make the employer the maker of a database an employee made at work, and end the right fifteen years after the year it was made.

Source: Knowledge base legal protection

Copying for analysis

Section 29A of the UK Act lets a person with lawful access copy a work for computational analysis only for non-commercial research, so a commercial AI buyer needs a licence.

Source: Knowledge base legal protection

Next for your knowledge base

Getting the pages out of the tool comes first: Confluence data export.

Describe the knowledge base your company wrote

14 of the 20 docs and wiki vendors we read say the pages are yours. Tell us where yours are kept and who wrote them, and we will reply about them: a licence while you trade, a sale of a closing company's pages, or a partner route.

The pages

What is most of the knowledge base?

  • One person reads each knowledge base enquiry
  • No docs tool on the board learns what you told us
  • Keep page text and file exports out of the form

Sources

This site's own datasets, every figure quoted from its source and dated:

  • Who takes written company knowledge for AI: 9 of 17 organisations whose pages we read name documents, articles or other written content among what they take, read 28 October 2026.
  • What protects a company knowledge base in law: 15 provisions of US and UK law on who owns and what protects a company's written knowledge, each quoted from the statute, the court or the authority's own page, read 27 October 2026.
  • Knowledge base software data terms: 3 of 20 knowledge base software vendors whose terms we read reserve the right to use their customers' data in aggregated or anonymised form, read 28 October 2026.
  1. Atlassian Product-Specific Terms (Confluence)
  2. Atlassian AI Trust Center
  3. Confluence, export content to Word, PDF, HTML and XML
  4. Notion Master Subscription Agreement
  5. Notion AI Learning and Early Access Program Terms
  6. Notion privacy practices
  7. Notion EU Data Act FAQ
  8. Guru Terms of Service

Ask what your knowledge base could be licensed as

14 of the 20 docs and wiki vendors we read say the pages are yours. Tell us where yours are kept and who wrote them, and we will reply about them: a licence while you trade, a sale of a closing company's pages, or a partner route.

Ask about my knowledge base
Ask about my knowledge base