Slashdot Mirror
Internet Brands Sues People For Forking Under CC BY-SA
David Gerard writes "Internet Brands bought Wikitravel.org in 2006, plastered it with ads and neglected it. After years, the Wikitravel community finally decided to fork under CC by-sa and move to Wikimedia. Internet Brands is now suing two of the unpaid volunteers for wanting to leave. The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a declaratory judgement (PDF) that you can actually fork a free-content project without permission. Internet Brands has a track record of scorched-earth litigation tactics."
I would boycott these assholes if I'd ever heard of them.
How can they not understand that volunteers are exactly that: someone volunteering. And their volunteering can cease at any time. They should be countersued for abuse of legal procedures.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
What the hell is a CC by-sa? I did RTFA, but perhaps my reading comprehension is lacking.
Time for the internet to rise up and light these detection firms up like Christmas tree with false positives.
But it's not content theft; the volunteers who are forking via Wikitravel via CC-sa are obeying the license that the source site uses; it's even on the original site right now:
"Wikitravel uses a copyleft license for all text, images, and other content on the Web site. Anyone can use Wikitravel content according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license."
via: http://wikitravel.org/shared/Copyleft
The Creative Commons License that it was under gives you the right to do exactly that. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
There's no theft here. All the web site content is published under a license that allows copying, provided you attribute the original.
They bought it, they can bury it. Just because someone is trashing something doesn't give you the right to steal it from them claiming you'll use it better.
What's good for the goose is also good for the gander.
If I write something for Wikipedia, then *I* am the original copyright holder.
When posting it to Wikipedia, I license *my content* to Wikipedia under fairly liberal terms.
Because I am the copyright holder, I am free to license it to one or more entities under the same or different terms, or contribute it to the public domain.
Just because somebody owns one copy doesn't mean they own all copies.
You misunderstand the situation. They do not own the copyright to the material on the website. Furthermore, it is all licensed under a cc-by-sa license, so even if it were, they presumably would still have the right to use it however they like (that is how it is licensed). The only people "stealing" anything are the website owners.
Citation that they are not?
The citation showing that current materials on WikiTravel are licensed under CC-BY-SA is in the post to which you've replied to. You can go and read the text of the license yourself, it's public. Finally, all Wikimedia projects to date (Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc) are also under CC-BY-SA, so of course this one will be, as well.
That would be true but the materials they purchased the rights to had already been made available under the Creative Commons License BY-SA. Internet Brands has the rights to the content, but they can't revoke licenses already given. The license under which the material was already made available permits redistribution as long as the redistribution is done with an identical license to the original and provides attribution, so if Wikimedia follows those guidelines they are free to redistribute it, create derivative works, etc.
Consider this analogy in the print world. I write a novel and license a PublisherCo to distribute the novel in any form for all time in exchange for a big one-time payment up front. I'm then free to sell the copyright to Paper Brands for another one-time payment. Paper Brands now holds the copyright, but the licenses are still out there. They can't call up PublisherCo and call takesies-backsies any more than I could have before selling the rights.
Note that Internet Brands was bought by a private equity firm a couple years ago. This stupidity is consistent with the private equity way of doing business. They always seem to have a really poor understanding of the businesses they buy. And indeed they don't need to, since their business model seems to be acquire, pillage, and abandon.
This is what I most hold against a certain private equity capitalist who's now running for President. Bain is most often criticized for costing people their jobs, but layoffs can be justified if cutting back helps save the company.
But Bain never saved anything. The acquired previously healthy companies and drove them into the ground. Inasmuch as they actually tried to run them, they did so ineptly. But mostly they just found ways to pass assets onto their own investors and pay themselves fat management fees in the process.
So of course Internet Brands is acting stupidly Stupidity has become a valid business model!
I'm not sure what you are trying to say exactly, but you might want to do a little more reading.
Time for the internet to rise up and light these detection firms up like Christmas tree with false positives.
I concur.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
http://static.ibsrv.net/ibsite/pdf/2012/2012_9_4_Internet%20Brands%20Files%20To%20Protect%20Its%20Wikitravel%20Trademark%20From%20Deliberate%20Infringement.pdf
Not true. You can revoke the licensing rights to your novel. Copyright licensing rights are not unrevokable.
Maybe you should read their actual lawsuit.
http://static.ibsrv.net/ibsite/pdf/2012/2012_9_4_Internet%20Brands%20Files%20To%20Protect%20Its%20Wikitravel%20Trademark%20From%20Deliberate%20Infringement.pdf
People that know how to write know that it is mandatory to define non-standard terms and to expand acronyms upon first use, rather similarly to how programmers must declare their types or variables.
The whole point of writing is to make clear to the reader the idea that you are attempting to impart. The writer wants to paint a clear picture in the reader's mind. The writer should not want to challenge the reader or his/her abilities and the writer certainly should not want to frustrate the reader.
Now, some writers are not very good and any writer can make a mistake. It is for these reasons that publications, such as Slashdot, have editors. The editors are supposed to perform the final quality control, if you will, on to-be published material. They are supposed to spell check, grammar check, and even alter the writer's work for correctness, clarity and sometimes brevity. This being Slashdot though, the editors will continue to be shit slinging monkeys, trying to get the poop to stick on the walls.
See what happens when you Google this: STFU!
I should say not unrevokable unless you have a contract saying otherwise.
The Wikitravel.org website is theirs. The content was created by volunteers, who agreed to let the site use the content they created under the CC by-sa license. At no point did the content creators relinquish their copyright to Wikitravel.org. In fact the volunteers all agreed their content could be shared and modified under the Creative Commons license, as long as the modifications were also shareable.
Wikitravel wants to claim copyright on material that was never theirs to begin with.
Statement ending with a question mark?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I'm surprised that nobody brought up the dual nature of copyright licenses by now. When you contribute to a project, it can be a work for hire. But, it can also be authorship. So, you grant the site permission to publish this data, but most of the times you don't forfeit the rights to also publish that data yourself. So, you are free to re-publish your contribution elsewhere. In many times it can also be quoted in its entirety if it's a short comment. If you haven't forfeited all your copyrights, you might just still have the right to re-publish your original work. Because you are bound by the copyright you set for yourself when you published your contribution on a site. The law here is really muddy. I doubt most of the users even know what I'm talking about. For instance, you can contribute code to a GPL project while you at the same time use that code in a closed-source product that you sell for yourself as long as you made the code in question. Most of the time copyrighted material will be licensed under several different licenses to multiple entities.
I hope Internet Brands wins. Fuck the freetards.
So, um, I notice you're using words from the English language without a license, freetard. See you in court.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I've seen exactly that happen before (minus the lawsuit). I actually found a GM script and used it for a while to automatically go to the equivalent wowpedia page whenever I directed my browser to open a page on wowwiki, after they moved all their content and allowed the original wiki to continue to exist as a stagnant shell. Fun times.
As a former employee of theirs (worked for a company that IB bought, left about a month post-acquisition), I can't say I'm surprised. It was clear they had no interest in developing or maintaining a quality product, but that their business model was simply to milk their assets for revenue while leaving them to wither on the vine. Several weeks after the acquisition closed they brought the hatchet down, and in return for severance pay, asked all fired employees had to agree *never to apply for a job at IB or any subsidiaries, ever* - not that it was really a risk, but WTF?
Will be nice to see them get spanked.
Declaration ending with a period.
That's really cute. But judging from your vehement arguing for the indefensible in this case, I'm going to have to strike your citation on grounds of "original research". Sorry, Ms. Giberti. Welcome to the internet.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Then you would make a horrible judge. I mean literally horrible.
This case has very little to do with the content or the CC-sa license. That seems to just be a red herring used to raise the righteous indignation of slashdot.
The actual suit seems to be about trademarks and misleading statements. Namely statements that say that WikiTravel is becoming or moving to WikiMedia. WikiTravel is a trademark owned by Internet Brands, and is not moving to WikiMedia. Some people that used to be associated with WikiTravel are moving to WikiMedia and taking content with them, but that is not the issue..
They bought the servers and the rights to the name of the site, but they did not buy the information, since the information never left the ownership of the people that posted it in the first place, according to the terms of the Creative Commons license under which that information was provided to the site. The site is only able to display the information because they have the right to do so under Creative Commons, but those same rights also allow anyone else to freely copy it and host it elsewhere.
If they wanted to sue them for using the Wikitravel brand name elsewhere, they may have a case. Similarly, since they own the servers, they could simply shut the servers down and deny anyone access to the information. But they have no leg to stand on when it comes to suing a group of volunteers who are not contractually bound to support the site and who retained full ownership of the content that they provided to the site. Those volunteers have to legal obligation to the site, nor is there anything stopping them from taking their content (or anyone else's, since it's all freely available according to Creative Commons) and going elsewhere.
Oh when the shills, oh when the shills, oh when the shills come march-ing in, Oh I post, AC, for this company, Oh when the shills come marching in....
The IB complaint mentions "unlawful acts" several times, but usually without any specifics. The only allegation that comes anywhere close to a trademark infringement is that one of the defendants sent an email saying "the wikitravel admins are planning to..." do exactly what they then did, i.e. fork the project. That's a nominative use of the wikitravel trademark, totally protected under the First Amendment.
The IB complaint really tries to paint a picture of some kind of tortious interference, but doesn't actually list that claim. Possibly because those admins are volunteers and they have no business relations with IB to interfere with.
It's a little odd that Wikimedia filed a separate action; I'd think a simple demurral would make the original case go away more cheaply.
What you linked explicitly says that others can copy the wikitravel website because of the licence. So according to your own document it's not theft if it's attributed.
The complaints are about trademark infringement and various things which had nothing to do with the fact that wikitravel was copied but merely deals with the circumstances around it being copied. In other words it's nothing to do with the licence so your statements are utter BS.
What you linked explicitly says that others can copy the wikitravel website because of the licence. So according to your own document it's not theft if it's attributed. In other words your original statement was utter stupidity and you just admitted as much. Good job.
The complaints are about trademark infringement and various things which have nothing to do with the fact that wikitravel was copied but merely deals with the circumstances around it being copied.
Please dont feed the trolls.
Sincerely,
The internet.
No, that is entirely false. Read the lawsuit, not the bullshit flamebait summary.
The suit is about Trademark Infringement, Unfair business practices under the Lanham Act, Unfair business practices under California Business Practices Act, and Civil Conspiracy. Copyright is not mentioned at all.
Basically, WikiTravel (Internet Brands) is claiming that the site was forked, which they admit right in the suit is legal. However, these two 'unpaid volunteers' , who were admins for WikiTravel (and are the ones who forked the site) then went on WikiTravel's web site and made statements to the effect that WikiTravel was moving to or becoming WikiMedia. That is a lie. WikiTrave is a trademark owned by Internet Brands, and is going nowhere. They also used their admin authority to send emails from WikiTravels email to WikiTravels customers stating the same thing.
They can fork the site if they want. They can not claim or imply that the site is WikiTravel (a trademark violation). And they can not make it appear as if the WikiTravel business no longer exists or has become something else. That is a Lanham Act violation.
Exclamatory!
Title of the song!
But it's so much fun to use their own shit against them.
I hope Internet Brands wins. Fuck the freetards.
You are posting AC, so I think it is fair to assume you haven't paid for a slashdot subscription.
That makes you a freetard. So, you first - let's see you fuck yourself!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Let me bust out my acronym dictionary.
These volunteers could launch counter claims against the company and possibly get millions!!!!!
I don't think ANYONE wants to see that!
Geesh. It is not about forking a CC project. You can already do that. It's about people that misrepresented themselves to direct traffic away from a site. I think the author of the quoted story is simply trying to provide some damage control, so that the shit storm that these volunteers have stirred up by their deceptive actions won't completely wreck the already forked part of the CC project.
the whole basis of the GPL, BSD, CC, and all other 'open source' licenses is founded in copyright law, you bulbous, leaking colostomy bag.
who go after wall street?
ask Leah McGrath Goodman.
or Moe Tkacik
or Michael Lewis
as the 'wikitravel company'. the company doesnt own the 'community'.
No, we should welcome you to "the rest of the internet", which is not actually Wikipedia.
You see, Wikipedia's rules actually only apply to Wikipedia itself. "The rest of the internet" does not actually need to follow them.
I was active in Wikitravel at the time Internet Brands bought the site. They knew damn well that the content was CC-BY-SA licensed and what that meant (that the content was not theirs, and could be taken and reproduced anywhere), and they explicitly promised the community that they would abide by the terms of that license. Obviously they have no intention of doing so, as demonstrated by the fact that they have spent the last several years dragging their feet about their promises to make the content easily portable.
Suing volunteer contributors for casually using the name "wikitravel" in reference to a community of contributors which existed long before IB bought the trademark rights to the web site, is unconscionable. Trademark rights are intended to prevent customers from being ripped off by other companies, not to squelch the free-speech rights of individuals to talk about the company. This is fundamentally no different from if employees of Widget Corp identified themselves as "employees of Widget Corp" and talked about why they were organizing a strike, or calling for a boycott, or threatening to quit.
IB owns a domain name and the exclusive rights to use the mark "Wikitravel" in trade. That is all. They do not control the right to say "Wikitravel" or to talk about "the Wikitravel community" in reference to the people who use the web site that IB hosts.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Lying isn't a crime, or a trademark violation for that matter. Hey watch this
Slashdot is moving to bws111.com!!!! Check it out now!!!.
Was that a trademark violation? No. It was just a lie.
True, but they do own the name WikiTravel, and unless the people who own the trademark say it is moving, it isn't moving. If they had said 'members of the WikiTravel community are moving to WikiMedia instead' or something similar that would be different. But they worded it to make it appear as if WikiTravel itself was simply moving to a new host, which is likely to lead to confusion, which is exactly what trademarks are supposed to protect against.
IANAL, so I just have to know: how do you "wrongfully" email someone, anyhow?
I'm the one who posted #41266571
Maybe in your eyes, but under the one and unblinking eye I would be a great judge. I'm a mean-
natured, spittle licking pervert who feels only contempt and hatred for his "fellow" man. Far as
I'm concerned those volunteers ought to be hit with hundreds of thousands each in damages
or be made to contribute again valuable content to the site. In fact what I'm seeing here is actually
commercial terrorism (we tried to ram that through a few years ago in Utah but hey we'll get it
eventually), these people should be put on a no fly list as well.
Naw nobody is paying me .. I just hate people and hope you all have a most terrible time in this world. I could not give a shit
about IB. You're all junk food devouring, prescription drug poisoned trashbags full of crap and pus sat in front of a TV set until
they come and pick you up.
Wikipedia's rules actually only apply to Wikipedia itself. "The rest of the internet" does not actually need to follow them.
When the internet welcome party gets done with me, I'll have them commence immediately on the epic bash welcoming you to the planet Earth. You know, that place where citing a lawsuit filing is not and has never been a valid citation of how copyright can be interpreted or whether the terms are being obeyed by a particular party.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I don't find a reference now, but wasn't there a lawsuit about Popeye where the court decided that if the copyright is expired a trademark can't prevent copying of the work? Isn't this a similar situation?
I mean, if Internet Brands adds text containing the trademark "WikiTravel" to a CC work, they gave permission to use the trademark in the work under the CC license.
If they use their own trademark as the title of the work, I don't see how they can prevent people to refer to the work using the trademark
The lawsuit, at least according to the Wikimedia Foundation and its legal counsel, is about intimidating the "administrators" who initiated this move from Internet Brands to Wikimedia.
Saying that the WikiTravel community is moving to Wikimedia sounds pretty reasonable, at least in the context it was used. Internet Brands is crying foul and trying to make sure none of the other admins for any of its other websites would ever consider to do something like this. It really is a preemptive strike trying to keep the rest of its websites in line.
What the Wikimedia Foundation is doing though is saying loud and clear: If you want to come to the WMF as a sister project, we'll consider it and you don't need to fear Internet Brands and their thugs.
Besides, this is a public relations disaster of monumental proportions that is only going to get worse the longer this plays out. The Streisand Effect has certainly kicked in, and it will only get worse.
If the WMF was using the WikiTravel trademark name, there might be a real case here. Unfortunately they aren't... and if anybody has dealt with the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects you would know they are anal retentive about intellectual property issues to a fault.
The real issue seems to stem from a mass e-mail that normally MediaWiki (the software... that just happens to be used by Wikitravel but is also actively under development by the Wikimedia Foundation and its volunteers) allows people with "admin" privileges to send a message of community-wide importance. I've had admin rights on this software before, so I do know how that could work as well. In the e-mail message apparently one of the mentioned that the "WikiTravel community was moving". That was the ugly phrase that is being asserted here.
Well, the truth is that the community is moving. Everybody that was doing all of the work is tired of the situation and wants to start up a new project. Good for them, and I want to encourage that to happen as well. I seriously doubt there was any sort of policy for volunteer admins on the site that prohibited them from sending out such an e-mail, and certainly by calling it the "WikiTravel community" and not "WikiTravel", that may be enough protection.
The funny thing is the obscure computer consulting company, Holliday IT Services Inc., is likely going to get a whole lot of attention in this whole thing. Hopefully what happens here is that Internet Brands gets smart and settles the lawsuit by simply dropping it altogether. Otherwise this is going to turn into SCO v. Novell all over again.
The complaint is about an admin saying "WikiTraval is moving to Wikimedia" in a mass e-mail to all users who associated an e-mail to their user account on the wiki.
I really want to see where in trademark case law it states that is an infringement of trademark usage, and on top of that where in the policy pages and agreements for admins (if there ever was any at all) that kind of activity was prohibited?
I highly doubt that the admins were required to sign any sort of agreement at all (even a click-through agreement), much less agree to any sort of draconian terms that the company would impose on such admins. That will likely change for Internet Brands websites, but then again who would want to be a moderator working under such ugly terms?
Otherwise, the whole thing is being ticked off at the admins of WikiTravel, who collectively as a group decided to abandon ship. That perhaps a few people might remain behind after the long service admins leave is besides the point. The people who are doing the hard work of maintaining the site and trying to fight against spam and welcoming new users to the site are leaving. That really is the "community", particularly if they switch to another URL to be doing largely the same kind of work using the same policies.
The civil conspiracy, such as it is, involves admins of WikiTravel sending e-mail messages and "private meetings" at events like WikiMania (the annual "convention" of Wikimedia volunteers) to discuss the possibility of moving the WikiTravel community to become a Wikimedia sister project.
I don't even see how that is illegal.
They aren't saying that the new site is WikiTravel, but the community that once upon a time was maintaining the WikiTravel website (especially the grand majority of the administrators and bureaucrats who did most of the heavy lifting on the site) are moving. That isn't even a lie.
Since most of the folks who used to be admins on WikiTravel have had their privileges revoked, I suppose it is a moot issue as the door is being slammed behind them.
As for if a volunteer administrator can possibly be called a corporate officer charged with fiduciary responsibilities that could be prosecuted under the Lanham Act, that would be an interesting bit of case law. The fact is that they really couldn't speak on behalf of the company any more than a stock clerk (aka "associate") can speak on behalf of Wal-Wart. It will be really interesting to see where all this will go, but I don't think they would even be capable of violating that law as you suggest. Certainly the new website that was referenced did not use or operate under the name "WikiTravel'
It is also factually correct that WikiTravel as a business no longer really does exist as a practical matter. It is just a hallow shell of a website with a bunch of content and nobody to maintain it. Apparently most of the content had a bunch of website crawlers plow through it and that content will be transplanted to the new wiki once everything is in place.
This certainly is going to go down in history as a classic way of how not to treat volunteer administrators on a wiki. Internet Brands is just digging a deeper grave for themselves if they try to push this further.
That may well be the case, but that does not appear to be what they are complaining about here.
They are not complaining about somebody referring to WikiTravel, they are complaining about somebody pretending to be WikiTravel.
If these two guys starting this new site were not trying to deceive anyone they could have sent a letter saying "Hi, we're trying to start our own website to compete with WikiTravel. We have legally copied all of the content from WikiTravel. We hope that as a contributor, you will stop contributing to WikiTravel and will instead contribute to our website."
That would probably have been fine, because they are not attempting to deceive anyone, and the use of the WikiTravel name was as reference only.
Instead, they sent a letter saying something to the effect of "This is a message from the WikiTravel administrators. As a member of the WikiTravel community, we want to remind you that the WikiTravel community is migrating to WikiMedia".
Do you see the difference? Any reasonable person reading that first statement would have no doubt that the new site was not in fact WikiTravel, but a new site to compete with it. The same reasonable person, on reading the second statement, could easily come to the conclusion that WikiTravel itself was moving or being renamed, and if they want to continue contributing to what was WikiTravel they must now migrate to WikiMedia. That is an intentional deception.
I have no clue about the merits of the case, and frankly I don't care in the slightest about the case.
That said, the fact remains that the case is not about copyrights, CC-sa licenses, suing people 'for wanting to leave', or any of the other crap that the summary said and subsequent posters think it is.
Also, 'volunteer administrators' are not being called a corporate officer, William Ryan Holliday, owner of "Holliday IT Services Inc" (a California corporation) is being sued, as is James Heilman, a board member of WikiMedia Canada.
And the problem is not that they a speaking on behalf of the company, it is that they are acting as if they are speaking on behalf of the company.
Also, since when are 'adminstrators and beaurocrats' the community? The community is at the very least ALL of the contributors, and many times include users. And claiming that 'the community' is moving IS a lie - some admins are moving, they do not represent 'the community'.
And WTF is with the "WikiTravel as a business no longer exists" crap? The site exists, works, and is being updated. The home page was updated three days ago, and random clicking on articles shows many articles added/altered in the last month.
They didn't say IT was moving. IF XYZ is a social media company with a site by the same name and I and all of the other users of XYZ decide to jump to ABCbook, it is perfectly fair and accurate to say the XYZ community is moving to ABCbook.
I guess all of that is up to a judge and jury to decide, if these folks want to go forward.
The awesome thing is that the Wikimedia general counsel is essentially offering his services (with permission of the WMF board of trustees) to act as their attorney so this can set a precedent to tell would be idiots like Internet Brands to suck an egg. They have the WMF at their back.
As for if it was a lie or not, that is also the point of this going to adjudication. I really don't think IB is going to succeed here.
I would have to presume that some sort of "consensus" happened among the admins to speak in this manner. Perhaps what is being portrayed elsewhere is also a lie to suggest that a vast majority of the admins are making the move together with a large number of regular contributors. There will always be stragglers being left behind, but the bulk of the community is moving. Perhaps you have some evidence to the contrary, but that seems to be the situation. To quote:
--- http://www.wikivoyage.org/general/Migration_FAQ
I'd be curious who is going to be left after all of these experienced admins are gone? There might be a few people who are newly promoted admins, but unless they have substantial experience in running a high traffic wiki they are going to be quickly overwhelmed. This Slashdot story alone is going to flood the site with trolls that is going to test the patience of the admins. Certainly the heart and soul of the site are going to be gone.
Somebody is certainly telling a lie here. My gut reaction is to suggest when terms like "unanimous" are thrown around, that it really means something.
However most copyleft licenses are not revokable. The CC-by-SA 2.0 license in particular can't be revoked for anybody who has obtained content distributed in that manner. Ditto for something like the CC0 1.0 license that goes even further and is essentially placing something in the public domain... but with legalese to make sure it stays there.
Most licensing arrangements outside of the "copyleft" type are much more restrictive, such as granting exclusive sales for a region or country. In order for them to be revokable, they also need to include a clause so they can be revoked.
Billy Joel, to use an example of a musician who signed away the rights to much of his music through a more traditional contract license agreement, took decades to finally reacquire the rights to his own music when he wanted them back. He could have put a revokable clause into that contract, but for whatever reason he didn't.
Your reading comprehension skills leaves a little be desired. They said the "wikitravel community" was moving, and they were quite clear that they were leaving the wikitravel site and internet brands. There was no opportunity for confusion, nor was any alleged.
They claimed the community was moving, not the site itself. There may be an issue calling it the "wikitravel community" because the wikitravel name is trademarked, but they never claimed the site itself was moving. It may appear that way, and that may or may not be illegal and probably would be confusing at least, but that's up to a judge and/or jury to decide. To say the least, it's not very nice to the owners to (ab)use the website and mailing platform of wikitravel to inform people that you are forking the site, but if it's illegal, I wouldn't know. After all, it's community driven and all content is "free", so if a community decides to do something, the company providing the infrastructure is more or less powerless if that community decides to use the infrastructure in a way that their business plan did not count on.
I think that it all boils down to the fact that Internet Brands did nothing more than facilitate infrastructure to a community and the community decides to move on and leave Internet Brands. The fact that they used a trademarked name may or may not be illegal, but I don't think that (ab)using the infrastructure that IB provided them to announce the move is illegal, given the spirit of this and other agreements alike.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
"to fork under CC by-sa"
I'm still trying to understand what that means.
CC by-sa is a standard term. Not knowing CC licenses is non-standard.
CC-by-sa(Creative Commons by Share Alike license) is not only a non-standard term, it is also an acronym. Thus it should be expanded upon first use in ever writing. As I have now, not entirely correctly, demonstrated. The expanded term should first be used, followed by the acronym in parenthesis. Most write style guides agree on this.
My tall-horse riding friend above is correct.
Internet Brands destroys everything it touches. vBulletin is a good example.
It's a little odd that Wikimedia filed a separate action; I'd think a simple demurral would make the original case go away more cheaply.
Apparently in the previous case with Xenforo, Internet Brands (who had purchased Jelsoft/VBulletin) sued xenForo and its former employees both in the UK and in California. And this is despite Internet Brands having its' HQ in California and this is also despite the fact that most of the parties involved: Jelsoft, VBulletin, and xenforo, also had all originated from California and were California-based at the time as well (and I assume that most of those former employees in question, the ones who started Xenforo, must also have been located in California as well).
On 4 October 2010, "Internet Brands commenced a lawsuit in the courts of England and Wales against XenForo, and its founders, Kier, Mike and Ashley".[5]
On 29 October 2010, Internet Brands filed a second lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Central District of California through its wholly owned subsidiary vBulletin Solutions, Inc. against xenForo Ltd., and its founders Kier, Mike and Ashley. The lawsuit alleges "widespread infringement and unlawful exploitation" of vBulletin's source code and "equally damaging misappropriation of trade secrets" developed and owned by vBulletin with "investments of millions of dollars over the last ten years." The lawsuit further alleges that the developers of XenForo Ltd. "took with them virtually every type of document a competitor would need to enter the market and unlawfully create a competing bulletin board software program." [6]
But since the lawsuit was first started in the UK -- that limited the scope of the lawsuit in California. See this one paragraph (in current need of citation) from their Xenforo Wikipedia page:
On 7th February 2011, Judge Manuel Real denied all three motions by XenForo and its developer Kier Darby, to dismiss the case on grounds of forum non conveniens, non-subject matter jurisdiction and personal jurisdiction in California arguing that the California lawsuit is duplicative of the UK action[citation needed].
My guess is that the Wikimedia Foundation probably took preemptive action in California to make sure that IB (Internet Brands) wouldn't attempt to file the case in the UK against Wikimedia and the two volunteers, as IB did with xenForo and their former employees when IB knew that those guys really didn't have the resources to easily fight from across the world.
But then, this is just a guess. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not even sure what a "demurral" is (except for what its standard definition is on dictionary.com). Would a "demurral" be enough to keep a potential lawsuit on your jurisdictional home turf? To a layman like me, but it doesn't even make sense that in the case of xenForo vs. IB (Jelsoft/VBulletin), that the UK got in the middle of a lawsuit between two parties that were mostly based in the same foreign country and in the same state abroad.