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How to Stop Commerial Use of Copyleft Materials?
An anonymous reader writes "The Guild Wiki, an extremely popular fan-made wiki for documenting the Masssively Multiplayer game Guild Wars, was originally supported by donations, then later advertisements — supposedly just enough to break even. Just the past week, the owner of the domain name surprised this wiki community by revealing that he had sold the domain name, the database, and his services to Wikia, a commercial entity that intends to profit from Guild Wiki's content. The catch? Much of Guild Wiki's content falls under Creative Commons by-nc-sa license, which denies the commercial use of licensed material. Arena.net created their own community run wiki to serve as the in-game help system, because they didn't think they could use the material on Guild Wiki commercially. If Wikia continues to serve ads over Guild Wiki's content, how can the thousands of contributors to the site stop them without going to the expense/trouble of hiring attorneys (or the crude path of mass vandalism)? If it turns out the site owner has been making a profit all along from ads, what's the remedy?"
I guess would be to come to terms what exactly "commerial" is... :P
Send a DMCA take down notice to the hosting provider since the contents of the website infringe on your copyright? :) You shouldn't even need a lawyer for that, as there are plenty of RIAA and MPAA examples floating around...
Donate free food here
From what you say the site owner is making money from advertising, not directly from the content (e.g. by selling it). Now I understand that the authors of the content probably wouldn't be happy with the site owner making a profit even indirectly from advertising (which is only possible owing to the presence of their content on the site) but whether they can stop him presumably depends on the exact wording of their CC license. If the license doesn't stop him making this indirect profit then there is nothing they can do. I guess it should just serve as a warning to others to ensure that the license you release something under exactly matches your intent for how you want to allow it to be used.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
You can't destroy a wiki with vandalism. A simple script can roll every single page back to a particular date, and then it can all be locked. You can ruin the community aspect of it, and presumably take away a great deal of the value assuming Wikia believe they're buying the community rather than merely the content, but if Wikia think the content is finished and in a state where they can sell it (through advertising) then there's little that can be done.
Except...
The authors of the wiki pages are the owners of their content, and as such they're free to put their content onto the other wiki. They're free to put it onto 1000 other wikis. With some SEO expertise it should be possible to make Wikia's purchase completely worthless because noone would ever see it, so noone would ever view any of their adverts.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
...are specific in usage restrictions. I can see this going to court. In which case, I root for the users. The commercial entity isn't /asking/ permission to use the material, it's stating its /intention/ to violate the license under which the material is posted. Screw the users. Not the way to run a business if you want to stay in business.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Why make it difficult? Just let the commercial community wither and die.
it's not copyleft if commercial use is forbidden.
As much as I'm appalled by the legal incongruencies involved, the deal seems to be rather fair towards the contributors (except that they didn't get $$$ - but did they ever expect money in return for CC-NC content?)
... don't turn this place into a land of "lawyers and order".
I mean, Jimbo Wales is no idiot about Wikis (and seemed very down to earth guy when I met him). As much as this might be legal wrangling in the hands of the original owner, if I were a contributor I wouldn't be calling my lawyers. The ideal solution would be for the Wikia folks to ask for CC-SA (striking the NC) relicensing from all authors - in a classic King Solomon solution, by putting up a static data dump on torrents & offering to take down content of any contributor who objects from the wiki version.
But not the lawyers
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Fork 'Em
Just to clarify, copyleft ("SA" in CC terms) does not prevent commercial use at all. The problem here is the noncommercial ("NC") clause, which is something completely different.
IAAAL - I am actually a lawyer
all the license prohibits the new sites owner from doing is charging for copies. The new owner could even charge for access to the new site with the same content, because use of the wiki is not copylefted, only the content, so people could buy membership, then for as much as the new owners let them, run bots to download content for free redistribution under the same license. The new owners could just as legally cut them off for excessive downloads. no story here, except that people don't understand the license. Essentially its like a "for pay" hosting of gpl'ed software, the pay would be for access to the site, not the content.
I would have thought this answer was so obvious to anyone who knows Slashdot that the question wouldn't even have been asked. It's been used against decent people for far too long, about time it was used against weasels.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
My reading of non-commercial use means no direct or indirect revenue. That's a pretty tight definition as it would exclude anyone who charged advertising revenue even if they were a non-profit. Let's face it, with Hollywood accounting a non-profit can be very profitable if the directors and affiliated companies charge enough for their services. In my book that means if you receive revenue of any kind I want a slice or you get to take it down.
My ISP has a no commercial use clause for personal webspace. Put one advert on there or sell one thing and you're toast. It sucks but if you want to go commercial you have to bite the bullet and go elsewhere or pony up the money for their commercial hosting package. These guys are trolling. They're just trying it on and relying on the inertia of nobody suing. It's like all that opt-out clause shit the more sociopathic marketing men use.
The only cure for people like this is jail or a bullet in the head.
They are serving ads, Big woopdie butt ..... Is it really so hard to ignore advertisements? I do it all day on /., cnn and other sites. If someone owns a domain, and pays for the server something sits on, don't they deserve to at least make it worth it for them to keep managing this system?
Ahhh, the joys of dealing with uninformed masses. Non-commercial does not mean that they can't sell advertising on the page. It means that they can't resell the content of the pages themselves. They can sell all the advertising they want. What they can't do is turn around and offer to sell CDs of the content of the wiki.
My question is why the sudden change of heart about commercial use? It is stated that the site has had advertising, so why is it okay for the old site owner to put advertising on the site, but not okay for the new owner to put advertising on the site? The older owner may not have made a lot of money of the site (at least he claims he didn't, I doubt anyone but him really knows) but his intention was obviously commercial, as shown by his selling of the site and cashing in. It seems to me the license of being broken before and no one cared about it, so why is okay for the former owner to break the license bu not okay for the new owner?
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
1. DMCA takedown notice
2. register the copyrights
3. sue
4. profit
You have to do #1 in order to attempt to minimize damages. You have to register the copyrights in order to get punitive damages (which is important in this case, because the actual damages are likely to be small).
Just make sure your ducks are in a row before you send the DMCA notice. If it's wrong, you could theoretically be criminally prosecuted for perjury (Though no one ever has before, I think it's much more likely that this will be used against someone acting independently rather than someone acting for a large corporation. Powers that be, and all that.).
IANAL, and this is not legal advice. Consult an attorney before you do anything.
... the software industry?
1) come out with useful but buggy software
2) have buying customers users report bugs and make suggestions for improvements
3) sell upgrades back to them.
4) don't pay them for any of their work
5) Copyright and patent teh improvements you got from the users.
6) do like autodesk, don't allow the customer/users to sell their used software.
Here you have game players doing a bunch of documentation for free on a game that is commercial.
The web site made money off of the unpaid efforts of the documentators efforts in on site advertising and the sale of the site.
step Seven:
lock down the documentation and site and require all contributors to pay a monthly fee for access.
How can the contributors respond?
Copy the site to another location and sue the pants off of any attempt to stop this.
Using the DMCA to shut the site down is contradictory to the original intent of the contributors.
Consumer deception was applied by the site owner.
Since they are a wiki they can collaborate to read lots of law textbooks then write and run a case themselves. Perhaps wikia will even be nice enough to provide the free wiki in which to do this?
Obviously, IANAL.
From the FP, it sounds like you have two separate situations here.
First, you had free hosting that came with a domain name (and probably some form of basic administration in the setting up of the Wiki and keeping it running smoothly - Though your community may have separated those four "services").
Second, you have user-provided CC-nc content that happens to live on the above-provided set of services.
Your community (individually, keep in mind) "owns" the latter. You have no rights at all to the former (though your could argue the domain name itself as a trademark, I highly doubt you registered it as such, and the courts always favor the party who will actually use it for, y'know, "trade" over any nonprofit use.
So as much as you may object to this change, no one has actually violated your copyrights, yet. Your domain owner and admin sold their services, not your content ("the database" can have multiple meanings; you should generally presume a legal one until proven otherwise). Thus, you have two choices, as I see it:
1) Do nothing, and accept banner ads as the price of your hosting.
2) Inform the new owner of your intent, as a group, to disallow them the use of your content. Begin removing it from the current servers and move it elsewhere (a variation of what you called "mass vandalism").
In the case of #2, if Wikia starts doing massive rollbacks to "preserve" content you have every right to remove, then you can cry copyright infringement, and may want to hire a lawyer (this seems like a perfect class-action situation, if you can get anyone to take the case for such small stakes, since you don't actually want any cash for it, you just want an injunction against use of it by Wikia). They may, however, play it perfectly fair. They might expect to lose 10-25% of the community, and treat the rest well enough to stay and even recover over a few months.
But mostly, you should probably wait for an actual infringement before crying wolf.
This seems pretty clear to me:
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Unless the site owner had an agreement outside the content license (ToS?) then he had no right to license the content to anyone else or sell it to anyone else. IMHO the only relevant question is whether the purpose of the site is commercial.
If it's hosted in the US a DMCA take-down notice should be adequate to get your material off the site. If it's in Germany, that's an interesting question. I'm not sure how that works.
CreativeCommons is a license to use material, not a waiver of copyright or bill of sale. You can either choose to use the material according to the license terms or choose not to use the material, much like the GPL. Now whether any of this has teeth under German law...beats me.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Other replies have spoken about scraping this particular site's CC content and copying it to another wiki. That's fine if you can get to the content, but what if a hypothetical site abruptly converted to a fee-for-access format? Obviously you'd then need to either pay to recover what should be freely available, or scrape the data from someplace else, such as Google's cache or the Internet Archive. That assumes, however, that the content is available from those places, which could be prevented by adding suitable meta tags (nosearch, noarchive) during a period prior to the conversion.
So here are my questions: Are there any search engines or archive sites that will ignore meta tags that contradict a CC license and cache the content anyway? Is there any way to somehow cause Google or the Internet Archive to cache such content despite its meta data?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
It's funny. A while ago, probably not long after Google bought out Deja News, there was some bad feeling from Usenet contributors who felt that their content had been sold, and others were basically profiteering on the back of their work. A few custom services were also popping up, which reproduced the content on certain Usenet groups but splatted those irritating ad-links all over key words in the content. When I suggested that this was inappropriate in a discussion here, a whole load of people basically told me to STFU because once I'd posted the content on Usenet I should have known that was going to happen.
I pointed out that at the time Deja started keeping its archive, I (and many others) would not necessarily have been aware of it, and might reasonably have expected articles to expire after a few days (as they did at the time on pretty much all ISPs' Usenet servers). I was directed to the relevant RFCs and told that they said content could be kept effectively indefinitely, and that this was more important than the industry standard practice at the time that users would actually have experienced.
I pointed out that the only licence anyone had to copy my and others' copyrighted content from Usenet was the implicit one granted by posting in the first place, and that it was questionable whether this covered commercial use or for that matter the RFC-sanctioned archival if most people using the system didn't know that could happen. This, too was our problem, I was told.
I pointed out that splatting the hyperlink ads all over the content degraded the content and certainly would not be expected on a normal Usenet system. This, apparently, was just fair use, and the fact that US-style fair use doesn't even apply in my country (where some of the material was being posted) didn't matter.
The critics' conclusion: Too bad, get over it, you have no legal rights.
My conclusion #1: Don't ask Slashdot about legal rights, ask a lawyer.
My conclusion #2: Expect to get screwed by unethical/illegal business practices if you put your content on-line anywhere but you don't have big enough legal guns to defend it afterwards. But you should take what steps you can to minimise the effort required to defend your rights: including the non-commercial clause that applies here, for example.
My prediction: In the current, Web 2.0-ish world full of community-made content, there's going to be a lot of bad feeling sooner or later, as the numerous businesses who basically just host discussion facilities but then claim rights over the content start profiteering, potentially at the expense of those who wrote the material in the first place. The so-called "you write all the content, they keep all the money" model is a great deal for businesses but a lousy deal for the contributors, who tend to suffer from some idealistic illusion that their content is safe and the service they are supporting will continue to operate for their benefit even if it's not making enough money. A lot of people's feelings are going to get hurt as this happens more often, and this case is just the start.
My answer: If you want to share content on-line, always host it on your own terms. Don't use a commercial service for your blog, set up your own. It's almost as cheap and easy these days, and then there's no ambiguity about the ongoing hosting, the rights to the material, or the privacy implications of someone else holding potentially substantial amounts of personal data. If you want to set up a community site with friends, get a friendly geek to help you do so with your own web host, for the same reasons.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The relevant part of the license is the following:
For starters I don't like this wording at all. It grants a right that is conditioned on the intent of the entity exercising the license which makes it horribly vague. Now obviously this passage prohibits the sale of the material (e.g. give me five bucks I'll give you this content) but what this means for other uses (like advertising) is extremely problematic. Moreover, it would be very very harmful if the courts read this license to prohibit the use of the material in a way that lets one gain commercial benefits because of the mere interest and popularity of the work.
Suppose for instance a bunch of documentation is released under this licensce for some open source software. If any use requiring the license that is motivated by commercial advantage even if the compensation is only indirect is bared then IBM would be barred from paying some of it's employees from adding to the documentation on the wiki. Sure the result of their action is just to help the project like anyone else but they motivation is to gain commercial advantage by improving documentation for their customers (along with everyone else) and they had to use the license to make the modifications (derivative work). Nor could any such project be hosted on google code or take advantage of google's summer of code. After all google's motivation in both projects is to elevate their corporate image and thus give them a competitive advantage. Hell, even contributing to the project to impress your boss or to learn how to write/code so you can get a better job would be banned.
Of course you could try to weasel about the meaning of the word "primarily intended" to avoid these consequences but then companies like this could do the same. If you get to weasel on this word they can simply weasel and say something like "yes we want to make profit but our primary intention is just to provide a commercially stable distribution mechanism for this product and that requires being a profitable company." There just isn't any good way to distinguish using the copyright to draw page views which draw ad revenue from using the copyright to look good so you draw customers without explicit language in the license to make this distinction. You can't make the license mean "whatever I find objectionable is off limits."
Ultimately I think we are all better off if the non-commercial aspect of this license is interpreted narrowly, i.e, it stops you from charging admission to a play you are putting on with this material, putting it on a CD and charging for that CD or other direct exchanges of value for the work. As for what you do in situations like this one, you don't whine about it.
I understand the motivation for not wanting people to charge for your work or to otherwise turn your work into a commercial product but that's not what's happening here. Intuitively (though not legally) this company isn't behaving much differently than google (or slashdot in hosting our comments). They are aren't suggesting that the content isn't free or making sure you have to pay them for the work. They are just making a profit in return for hosting the material. If you don't like the ads the obvious solution is to set up an ad free alternative.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Understand up front that you can't have it both ways. You may either refuse the use of your work or not. They may show ads or collect the works into a compendium or do whatever they want. This is not within your control. The only thing within your control is whether or not they use the particular works you provided.
To that extent, you may remove -YOUR- works if you still have the power or demand their removal via a DMCA takedown if you've been shut out. You may also sue, however without a registered copyright and with only miniscule commercial value the damages you might recover will not be sufficient to pay your legal bill.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Websites are constantly turning massive amounts of user donated content based on thousands of hours of goodwill effort into commercial profit. And we make ourselves victims by contributing.
I first noticed it years ago when all that trackdata from CDDB went commercial. Then IMDB started having pay-only areas (bought by amazon.com)
Many wikis are LOADED with deceptive practices that make them look non-commercial when they are for profit. AboutUs.org is a classic example that comes to mind - a Wiki that entices people to give them info and content while they are commercial and for-profit. They somehow tricked all the registrars to put their link into whois data, perhaps under the guise of being a ".org"
Creative Commons licenses are non-exclusive. So, does he have anything in the posting agreement that says that he has the right to change licenses?
But a few things spring to mind here.
1) Functionally, this is a hosting move - the Gamewikis site is now hosted by Wikia. There are some ads that run, but no hosting bills. So the question becomes whether CC-BY-SA permits or prohibits using commercial, ad-supported hosting for CC-BY-SA content. (A secondary question is whether anyone who continued posting on Gamewikis after it was ad supported tacitly agreed that their content could be hosted by ad-supported hosting.)
2) Continuity of the site matters here. When one hits submit to put content on a wiki, one tacitly gives the hosts of that wiki permission to, well, host, distribute, and use the content. If there is a genuine continuity between Gamewikis and Gamewikies on Wikia, that tacit permission would presumably endure.
3) You can't easily sue without damages. That is, you'd have to be able to show non-trivially that the hosting by Wikia actually harmed you. This could be difficult.
4) The moral point here seems obscure at best. Nothing in the post or links gives any evidence that Gamewikis has made a profit in the past. Yes, they probably shouldn't have taken money for the site, but the fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, this is a change in hosting that brings Gamewikis onto a site that is run by good people with a sincere commitment to free content. I question what useful point is made by taking an angry, community-destroying stand here.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
bingo, or at least that is how I see it too.
Isn't it why you make donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Let's say someone sues. They win. They don't charge any money in first place. Wouldn't the damages be zero?
If that's the case (and I have no idea if that is indeed the case), enforcement wouldn't have any teeth.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
"Copyright" is a legal term and can apply to any written work regardless of commercial or non-commercial use. "Copyleft" is just a cute gimmicky made up word. Note that the GPL 3 begins with "Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation" The creative commons license also refers to copyright with "Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder."
Okay, now that everyone's in a tizzy, let's bring some reason back to the discussion.
First of all, almost every game out there, including Guild Wars, states in its terms of service that you can use their game content for non-commercial purposes. However, the content remains the property of the game company. That means that if, for example, you post an article in a wiki that contains verbatim descriptions of things found in-game or in documentation otherwise produced by the game company, which most articles are, you have absolutely no right whatsoever to make a DMCA claim because the content is not yours to begin with. If, and that's a huge if, anyone has a right to serve a takedown notice, it would be NCsoft, the owner of the IP for Guild Wars.
Second of all, I too own a popular gaming wiki for City of Heroes, and I too am in the process of moving said wiki over to Wikia. There are many reasons, but among the top ones is the fact that the wiki is become too popular and is overloading my server. Response times are going down, pages aren't loading, and I'm already paying a decent sum of money every month out of my own pocket for a site that has clearly exceeded the capacity of a hobbyist site. At this point, I have one of three options:
Regarding option 1, I am not a salesman, nor do I ever want to be. Plus, I just want to concentrate on making the wiki a quality resource for the game's players, not making templates for ads and dealing with money transfers and all. Plus, as you can tell from the submitter's blurb, I don't want to have to deal with people accusing me of doing it for profit. Regarding option 3, I guess some might argue that it would be better to have the information lost forever or dispersed to the winds of the Internet so that it's a lot harder to find, but I don't think that making information less available is in the spirit of what the CC license is about, or the GFDL that the Paragon Wiki uses.
Third of all, all wikis are commercial at some point in the chain. For example, the hosting provider I'm currently using to host the Paragon Wiki isn't free. Could it be argued that because someone (i.e. my hosting provider) is making money off the wiki, it is therefore a commercial endeavor and must be removed? No, that's stupid. If you must, think of this change as the Paragon Wiki, and GuildWiki for that matter, simply changing hosting providers. Instead of me paying a hosting provider money, though, they are getting it through Google ads. I know some folks are going to be saying, "But he got paid and is getting company stock!" And I got paid, too. However, I think you're grossly overestimating the amount. In my talks with Wikia, they told me that they were going to reimburse me retroactively for my hosting costs for the wiki, to give me the money back that I sunk into it for the past couple of years. I did the math. Their number is actually slightly lower than the actual cost, but it's pretty close. I don't know the details (and don't care to) of how much Gravewit got for moving his sites over, but I strongly suspect that he's been paying more in hosting costs than I have, and that it was a similar arrangement, with the money plus the stock value being around the same as his retroactive hosting costs.
Fourth of all, the submitter's summary really portrays Wikia in a needlessly negative light. Can we please acknowledge that they are providing a valuable service here? They could pick and choose only sites that will make them millions in ad revenue to host, but that's not what they're doing. Anyone who wants to can start a new wiki on any topic that they think would build a community, whether that's a community of a billion people or a community of a hundred. They provide gr
Send a DMCA take down notice to the hosting provider since the contents of the website infringe on your copyright? :) You shouldn't even need a lawyer for that, as there are plenty of RIAA and MPAA examples floating around...
You will need a lawyer and buckets of money to throw upon the legal fire you will create. Be prepared to be counter sued. Some guesses: Restraint of trade, interference with a contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress?
You shouldn't even need a lawyer for that
*NEVER* get involved in the legal system without a lawyer except for things like small claims court, traffic court, etc. You will "by definition" be acting as your own lawyer and therefore be a fool. Seriously, it can end up costing you far more than a couple of hundred buck for a short conversation with a lawyer. Sometimes you can get a consultation that includes advice for no charge.
Either suck it up, sue, or fork.
Jeeze. Such things are just as goofy as the restrictions coming out of "regular" copyright. If you don't like what they're doing start an alternative and forget about them. Otherwise take your money, and with all due respect, STFU. If they have no claim to exclusivity(which can only affect the signatories anyway), then ignore it, and use the material as you see fit. What difference does it make if somebody makes money with it if nobody can stop you from using or modifying or distributing it the way you like? That's what makes public domain the most desirable option. No lawyers, no judges, no 50 kilobyte licenses, just full access for everybody. If a commercial work contains public domain info, then that info is still in the public domain, and nobody can claim a monopoly over it. And I will go so far as to say that nobody can claim a monopoly on how the material is accessed, manipulated, laid out, etc. Public domain shall remain totally and completely public, to the advantage of no-one. Otherwise what's stated in the contract and ONLY in the SIGNED contract between the buyer and the seller should be the rule of the day. Nobody else has any obligations. This mad craving for control is spread around pretty evenly, even amongst those who consider themselves more "liberated". Makes you all sound like a bunch of hypocrites. Or even snobs. Phooey!
What?
Aside from things like quest text and screenshots (and that's debatable) pulled directly from the game, the sort of things put on these wikis would not be derivitave works any more than a book review would be.
I don't disagree with you in priciple, but the fact is that the people who wrote the articles licensed them to the wiki under specific terms, and it has a legal obligation to follow them. They can always start again with their own work.
Have you read most of the articles on these wikis? The vast majority of them are not critiques. They are, as I said, verbatim copies of texts and screenshots of images found within the games, or on official websites or within the game publishers' manuals. As such, the fair use protection doesn't apply.
At best, you might be able to come up with some kind of claim if you've used some sort of clever presentation of the information, but if you're just copied it over into a wiki, you most certainly have no claim on it.
The problem with DMCA takedown notices is that they're essentially legal spam. It costs absolutely nothing to send them, and there's no obligation to prove their claims before requiring action on the host's part.
You're never going to stop it. It's unstoppable. It's our fault for not adjusting our business model to meet with modern reality. why does this sound familiar?
google links to copyrighted material.
There is no conflict here.
If Wikia links to non-commercial material, what exactly is the problem?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't the fault lie with the previous owner? He's the first link in the profit chain, he sold the site to make money, therefore he broke the license it was released under.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Mod up parent. The apologist for Wikia is incorrect. When someone writes a review of a Ford Taurus, or a book on how to drive or repair it, the Ford Motor Company has no rights to any of those written works.
If there was ever an appropriate time for mod "Funny", the parent's post is it.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
And parent too. You dyclestic moderator you.
I find it sad that once a fanbase has got large enough, the options usually become "spread ads everywhere to pay for it". I'm not stating your decisions are wrong or anything, I just really would like a better solution than purely 'selling out', for want of a better phrase. Could the wiki be distributed among a peer of servers? I'm not a guru, but there must be some kinda of distributing system that can operate on commercial scales with the power of grassroots equipment/connections? Anyone got any suggestions here?
Launchy.net changed my world.
Let me get this straight: you want to enforce the legal requirements of the content license, but you don't want to use the legal system to do it. Sorry. If you want to enforce an agreement, you have to stand in front of a judge and show that the agreement is applicable and enforceable. (Retaining a lawyer is not mandatory, but is highly advisable.) There's no magical way to guarantee that everybody respects your rights as you see them.
I remember quite clearly that once upon a time non-commercial use meant that you didn't charge anyone for the material. It has always been the norm for the person redistributing the materials to serve ads on the sites to cover their expenses and if they can make a buck or two then more power to them. It isn't a sin to make a profit, as long as they provide a clean, easy to use, and accessible repository of content at no charge then they are empowering the internet by hosting more content for the masses. If they use ads in a way that is a pain the tail, the license allows you to build a new site to supplant them.
All the sudden this mentality has changed. I think it mostly started with copyright owners going after Youtube for profiting off their content. You can't control the media industry's hysteria on this but surely the community can recognize that the current model of the internet can't work without distinguishing how the content itself is being served from how the ads on the page are being served.
I realize the GPL doesn't prohibit a charge but just the same if the local bookstore had a big rack and banners saying they were giving out free Ubuntu DVD's I certainly wouldn't call that commercial use. They are giving the DVD's out for free and helping to spread awareness; if someone happens to buy a book while picking up a DVD then I'm happy for the bookstore.
Many aspects of the initial story here are flat out wrong.
First, the old owner sold the domain, and is handing over management of the wiki's content. Wikia will likewise make downloads available to anyone who wants it.
For a better understanding of the history of the wiki, see this posting: http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/User_talk:Gravewit#An_Open_Letter
For a better understanding of one of the complaints raised about the sale, see this posting: http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/User_talk:Gravewit#Hoping_to_ride_this_one_out_too.3F
For the one slim hope the community retains to either create their own wiki, or to at least redirect traffic to a community supported site, see this posting: http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/User_talk:Tanaric#WHOIS_lookup_on_.22Guildwiki.org.22
Thanks. I guess I will go look for those DVD's.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Oh please God, NOOOOOOO! Anything but that! We can't have people making money! Someone, please, stop them!
And please Guys,
Before sending a DMCA take down notice, make a phone call to the guy in question and ask for what you want from him, or try to remove the content yourself from the wiki (with a short explanation identifying yourself of course). Usually, site owners are willing to honor their users requests -- even if it means losing a ton of good content -- I know, I've seen this done on a number of sites.
Using the hammer of the legal system before exhausting your other more friendly options is the wrong thing to do. It's reactionary and immature. And it could potentially make you look bad when the judge asks you if you've tried any of the other more friendly options first.
I don't see how selling it to Wikia would be possible, since the contributors are submitted at the time of an incompatible license (unless Wikia decides to "Share Alike" for this wiki). It doesn't even help if GuildWiki changes the license now. It would still be a breach of the terms approved by the contributors up until the sale, in case the license will change.
This was why ArenaNet handled things differently. They did it this way: Started wiki.guildwars.com as the official Guild Wars wiki, that is instead of that CC-license using the GFDL license unless in exceptions (screenshots and art assets contributed for the wiki by the developers). Then contributors of GuildWiki could come over there and submit content that they themselves had approved to dual license for the GFDL. So a subset was moved over there, but they had to leave all content at GuildWiki that didn't have explicit permission for re-use.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
It's also worth noting that if not just one but many owners of their intellectual property, or their authorized agents, send take down notices to the same hosting service, that would get much more attention than the average one-off DCMA spam. Letters like "I'm the legal owner of some of the the intellectual property being hosted at offending.url.here ..." or "We are the authorized representative of John Smith, the owner of some of the intellectual property hosted at ...." all sent to the same hosting service or, in the case of self hosting, service provider, would get a lot more attention than just one notice or notices from only one source. I can't see any legitimate hosting provider keeping the site up if contacted by even a moderate percentage of the intellectual property owners. A remedy against past abuse or sale of the intellectual property will be far more difficult.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If he is getting stock options, then he is part of the company; from my limited understanding of business. While having some stocks allows him to participate in the company he is deferring his voice to people that have a larger stock option. However, this might mean that Wikia is bringing him and his sight onboard so the sight might not have been sold.
As for profit, all things cost money so you have to show that the people are making more money then the goods they need to host and to a limited extent maintenance; new servers, upgrade network, and stuff to accommodate the requests as well as to pay for the services to do these upgrade/maintenance. That's the tricky part, how much do you pay people to do hardware upgrade/maintenance. I guess, you would go with the average cost of these tasks. So the advertisement could be covering the cost of these tasks. The move could be viewed as a way to fix this problem.
However, what about the maintenance of the content? Does it have value? Should the largest contributors be included in the stock options? There would be no need to move it if there was no content. Again, if the content is in high demand them it might need to be moved to a place that can accommodate it. Also, should one person cover the hardware cost so everyone else can get it for free? However, if the approach to how the content is being maintained does not change or its policy then is there really any change? Is this similar to replacing a network card and see that the Opera still works; OSI model reference?
Just some stuff to think about. I for one think it's a good move. Also, sorry about the spelling and stuff. Very rushed for my view.
"This is /.," more folks then you can imagine have actually negotiated contracts B~I
... you know technology. Management and marketing fuck-up the best and screw-up the rest. I am an old Technology/Telecommunications Information Advisor, that always says TIA for my payday when management and marketing desk-jockey (CIO/CTO) and kennel-pups (BSch-Graduates) are on the other side of the table.
...) classes. After two or three years contracts are perfect money makers providing exceptional products and services quality (HAPPY CUSTOMER, Repeat Biz).
To make a profitable technology deal
Give me a Sci/Math/Eng/CS/Tech... BSci person with 3+yr [explicit] R&D (by the book) and 7+yr [implicit] field projects (hands on experience) then send'em to a few select business (Law, Accounting
Also, all my enemy are dead or farmers now, a plow is reasonable and takes great fortitude, show some respect to farmers and your mother they will always fed you.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Violation of "license agreements" is not Copyright infringement. Stop getting the two mixed up; they are completely different things. Copyright is a fixed body of laws, that are not changed by "agreements". Creating a license agreement has nothing to do with copyrights, per se, except that in general one can restrict uses via such agreement, but may not convey rights that exceed those in standing copyright law.
No agreement or contract is worth anything unless it can be legally defended. Any license can be violated with impunity if the licensor fails to enforce the license.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
would be this:
How much of the content is owned by the game maker, and how much by the contributors? That question answered, is it possible to prove that you made at least a best effort to get permission from _all_ the copyright owners?
Can't say whether your informal call for opinions from your users was sufficient as a best effort, but there were probably some who fell through the cracks, and if any of those is a hothead, you and wikia should prepare for some legal action.
Hopefully, all the legitimate copyright owners will be reasonable, and all the hotheads will get lawyers that will help them listen to reason.
However, there was another solution, to start taking voluntary collections from the community.
Or yet another solution, although I suspect it would involve quite a bit of development work -- spreading the wiki server and support activities across the community. Automatically balancing the load would be the toughest part to code right.
joudanzuki
If it was his site, and therefore he was the one who holds ownership of the IP, just because he allows others to use it under said CC license doeesn't mean he can't himself use it for his own, for-profit ends. His ownership = his choice of use. There are certainly arguments about someone else creating the content for his wiki. But if we assume that he made a clause in the terms of use, then he can use the content others posted to his own site to his own ends.
Is not a man entitled to the sweat of his brow? No, says the man on Slashdot.
The first paragraph says that most of the substantive content of the Guild Wiki is licensed by-nc-sa, which governs what visitors (but not necessarily contributors) can do with the Guild Wiki content. The second paragraph (beginning with "In English,") purports to decode the legalese of the first paragraph, but what it actually does is sloppily add a bunch of new principles about user contribution. In unclear terms, it seems to come close to saying that user contributions are given under a permanent, unlimited license.
A contributor might think that (thanks to the CC stamp) they are giving their contribution under a by-nc-sa license, but what they are actually doing is giving it under a permanent, unlimited license. By-nc-sa refers to Guild Wiki's choice to restrict the rights of anyone wanting to use the materials originally licensed to it by Guild Wiki's contributors.
However, because Guild Wiki didn't use the word "unlimited" in describing the license automatic to any user contribution, it's ultimately unclear as to which copyrights the contributors were supposed to be waiving when they decided to post. The only thing word that Guild Wiki uses to explain the license is "permanent." This is like me telling my neighbor that he can BLANK my lawn mower for however long he wants.
It's ugly, and I would bet that any attorney approached by either party will immediately (a) facepalm, then (b) explain why the case is not likely to be easy.
To anything other than verbatim text. Screenshots are a grey area, and could go either way. (Consider someone taking a photo of the Chrysler building.)
Quotations in a larger article are also fair use.
Everything that isn't soley a direct quote from the game is fair game for a DMCA notice.
> Much of Guild Wiki's content falls under Creative Commons by-nc-sa license, which denies
> the commercial use of licensed material.
I suppose that might qualify as "copyleft" under some definitions but it isn't Libre.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Actually, we are all beggars, in some senses. Independence is a conceit.
But more power to you as you move ahead. There just isn't going to be any way to satisfy everyone.
So if I open an ice cream shop and keep my ice cream at liquid nitrogen temperatures, and you then burn your tongue, you should have no legal recourse? After all, every one knows ice cream is cold. I just keep my ice cream a little colder than usual so it doesn't melt on the way home.
In the famous McDonalds hot coffee case, coffee was served at hotter-than-normal temperatures as a matter of policy. McDonalds claimed this was for folks who didn't drink the coffee right away. McDonalds had been repeatedly warned the coffee was too hot.
And in this case, the system worked. The judgment was for spit responsibility. The fact that the woman held a cup of hot coffee between her legs in a moving car and had a spill is her fault. The fact that the spill did not result in some red skin and minor discomfort, but rather in serious burns requiring skin grafts is McDonalds fault. Again, this was not an isolated incident--they had been warned the coffee was being served too hot.
Sounds about right. You're saying if I burn myself on something I know to be hot it is entirely my fault. I'm saying you lack "comprehension for subtleties" of burns--there's a difference between a hot beverage that causes a little tingle on the tongue and one that causes 3rd degree burns. There's also a not so subtle difference between something that is not meant to be touched and something that is meant to be touched or ingested.
Coffee is meant to be ingested, so it is reasonable to expect it will be served at a temperature appropriate for that purpose.