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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?"
... 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.
Forget that... did anyone notice that Wikia can smash this down in court on grounds that they were defrauded by the seller? After all, he must have lied to them about the license on the material in the product sold to them.
:)
Of course seller here can hammer Wikia with a "you bought a bill of goods and didn't do your *due diligence* on the subject, and are thus to blame for buying what you can't sell".
Irony at its best, but then again, this is slashdot, I wonder how many of you can actually negociate contracts
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Well, the write up says that wikia is a commercial entity. According to the generally accepted thought about the NC option (from what I gather) a for profit corporation cannot avail themselves of any NC based licenses whatsoever.
By definition, it is said, everything they do is primarily for profit.
Personally, I don't like seeing non-Free licenses called copyleft, but that is a different argument. "Copyleft - all rights reversed" just doesn't work well in that case.
all the best,
drew
http://openphoto.net/gallery/index.html?user_id=178
Underwater Joy
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Very bright considering the principle of the matter: you have these people licensing their work under their terms, then you have this company intent on taking that work and pretty much living off the backs of the people who created it after being told pretty damn succinctly that they /cannot/ do what they intend to do, according to the terms of the license with which the material was distributed in the first place. That'd be like me buying a copy of [insert commercial software/music/DVD title here], duplicating it and selling copies on, en masse, to whoever wants it. Microsoft et. al., would have my balls in a sling in two seconds. Why shouldn't the little guy be able to do a switch on the BEC (Big Evil Corporations)?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
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...
:)
If you use an RIAA one for source make sure you remember to clearly the defendant and what they have done wrong though
Well, while /.ers are quite aware of DMCA takedown notices, most find their deployment a distasteful tactic at best. I don't think it is an issue of awareness so much as an issue of commitment to principles. While the tactic is normally employed by scary and disreputable corporate drones, the landscape becomes more complicated when it is employed by the so-called "little guys". Takedown notices are just a tool in an arsenal: Is it the tool itself that is the problem, or just the people who usually employ it?
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Were I the site's developer, I would simply use a license that claimed copyright of everything on the site then let the purchaser battle it out.
Maybe I'm missing something here but copyright is the foundation the various licenses(cc, gpl, bsd, etc) are built on. A license is terms under which the author permits others to distribute his work.
I think what you are trying to saying is you would claim ownership of all material & submissions. This would be posted in the site's "Terms of Usage".
The most obvious examples of how it should have been done are Thottbot and WoWhead. Both were created to accept user submissions to build the site, both sold to IGE for barrels of cash. They don't support the creative commons license. Neither should this guy have.
Thottbot & WoWhead claimed ownership of all material & submissions. If they wanted to, they could license the material under creative commons and still retain/claim ownership of all materials & submissions.
The license isn't the problem. The problem the guy(& purchaser) run into, is who is the copyright owner of the material. The way the site was setup is the author of the article is the copyright owner. Which means for the website to be legally allowed to distribute(publish) the article, the author needs to give the website permission to do so. This is where the creative commons license comes into play.
Do you follow now?
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy