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?"

Comments

Re:The first step:

[DaedalusHKX]

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 :)

Re:The terms of the license...

[Tastecicles]

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)?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Elemenope]

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?