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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."
drink it down
(Italian accent) I fork-a the free meat-a whenever I get-a the chance-a. Of course-a you can-a do that-a. Were they-a at-a a party-a or something-a?
I hope Internet Brands wins. Fuck the freetards.
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.
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 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.
I think people are losing a bit of focus here, sure the content they forked was retrieved under whatever license ..
but they are hurting a business in the long run and that's where the buck must stop. The way I see it, IB probably
paid for a lot of things such as servers and bandwidth and invested considerably in making the project marketable
so ownership of content issues not in favor of IB would take a backseat if I was hearing the case. Plus we must
also take into consideration that the volunteer content was created by individuals in their spare time, I don't want
to belittle that effort but essentially I could adopt the view that the content the volunteers provided is of minor value
compared to the major contributions made by IB.
You're in the hands of God on the high seas and in court :-)
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!
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
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'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'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.
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.
Let me bust out my acronym dictionary.
These volunteers could launch counter claims against the company and possibly get millions!!!!!
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'.
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?
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.
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.
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.