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."

Comments

Boycott!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would boycott these assholes if I'd ever heard of them.

Re:Boycott!

[plover]

I would boycott these assholes if I'd ever heard of them.

I'd just say fork 'em.

You get what you pay for

[sabri]

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.

Re:You get what you pay for

[ackthpt]

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.

Well, a little background on who Internet Brands is and what their business model is might help....

From wikipedia: The company was founded in 1998 as CarsDirect.com, launched from the business incubator Idealab. The company invented a consumer-advocacy approach to selling cars "haggle-free" online, an approach it continues to employ.[9] In 2000, Roger Penske invested in the company and joined the Board of Directors. In 2002, Time Magazine voted the site one of the 50 best in the world.[10]
The company changed its name to Internet Brands in 2005.[11] The company's IPO was in November 2007 on the NASDAQ exchange.[12] INET was added to the NASDAQ Internet Index on March 22, 2010.[13]
Internet Brands is headquartered in El Segundo, California; Autodata is headquartered in London, Ontario.
Internet Brands agreed to be acquired for $640 million by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman in September 2010,[14][15] and was thus delisted from NASDAQ.

Might be more interesting now to find out who Hellman & Friedman are...

Also from wikipedia: Hellman & Friedman LLC (H&F) is a private equity firm, founded in 1984 by Warren Hellman[2][3] and Tully Friedman,[note 1] that makes investments primarily through leveraged buyouts and minority growth capital investments.

Dunno about you, but LBO people don't set well with me after an LBO killed a company I worked for, which would have been worth at least a billion $ annually, had they invested in us rather than suck us dry like a bunch of leeches. YMMV

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

LBO - Private Equity - aka Corporate Raider: buy a company with little money down, load acquired company up with debt, charge acquired company millions of dollars in "fees" for "consulting", and then if company is still successful sucker the....do an IPO and if the acquired company goes belly up, stick the...put the company into bankruptcy and let the creditors eat it after siphoning millions of dollars out of the company. In the meantime, honest hardworking people - people who actually have to work for a living - get canned without so much as a handshake and the Private Equity guys walk away with millions or billions of dollars of equity that was sucked out of the company.

A great illustration of this technique was the bar that Paulie bought in the movie GoodFellas: run up the restaurant's credit, buy Cutty Sark, sell the booze at a discount, and when the restaurant goes bankrupt, burn it down the for insurance money. The only difference is that the Private Equity guys do the legal version.

That's how Mitt Romney made his millions: by fucking over small investors and banks.

Re:You get what you pay for

[bws111]

This has nothing to do with them being volunteers, and very little to do with the fork.

If you read the actual suit, you will find tha tthe actual complaints are trademark violations, among some other things.

From the suit, they are claiming that the 'unpaid volunteers' decided to fork the site (which they admit they can do). However, the admins then went on WikiTravel's site and made posts stating that 'WikiTravel (a trademark) was moving to WikiMedia'. It is not. In addition, they claim, these volunteers sent out emails to WikiTravel's customers, using WiikiTravel's email accounts, and again stated in these emails that WikiTravel was moving to WikiMedia.

If true, that is not 'forking a project', it is lying and forgery.

Re:You get what you pay for

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...way to not read TFA or even TFS friend. They are NOT suing because they left, they are suing because they forked Wikitravel which they want to keep as a spammy park page until you give them "what its worth" which I guarantee you is some insane amount that nobody in their right mind would ever give.

Sadly I got to see the same kind of douchebag behavior when I tried contacting the companies that put out the old shareware discs for putting out a shareware emulator on a stick. I wasn't gonna make a dime, the companies that made the shareware was gonna split every cent, and the actual game devs liked the idea of their old games being played again, it was the douchebag companies that had bought up the rights when the original companies went out of business that wouldn't settle for less than assraping. We are talking titles that wouldn't have made it up to even Codename:Tenka on name recognition and companies wanting $75,000+ AND the rights to all our stuff just to have their "precious IP".

Which is of course why we need a "use it or lose it" clause because otherwise you get shit like this, where a company has no desire or intention to ever do a damned thing with a property but won't let anybody else do a damned thing either without giving them 50 times what they paid for it. Total horseshit and I hope the volunteers win.

Re:You get what you pay for

[ohnocitizen]

Does it matter? To prove the critical point - that Bain under Romney was involved in predatory investing - a single example suffices. It happens that there are several. Rolling Stone - Why Bain is the Worst.

CC by-sa?

[the_humeister]

What the hell is a CC by-sa? I did RTFA, but perhaps my reading comprehension is lacking.

Re:CC by-sa?

[Orga]

Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

Re:CC by-sa?

[Old Wolf]

"CC by-sa" means:

Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.

Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work.

There is not any other restriction on commercial use of the work, or making derivative works based on it.

(source: Wikipedia)

Re:It's theirs no matter what they did with it.

[devlogic]

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

Private Equity Again

[fm6]

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!

Re:Good

[oakgrove]

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.

No Love for Internet Brands

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's theirs no matter what they did with it.

[bws111]

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.

Re:the trademark claims are bogus

[bws111]

I don't know what you were reading, but they clearly do state the claim.

29. For example, on August 18, 2012, Holliday improperly and
wrongfully emailed at least several hundred of Wikitravel members, purporting to
be from Wikitravel and informing members that the Wikitravel Website was
“migrating” to the Wikimedia Foundation. Upon information and belief, the
number emailed is far greater.

30. Specifically, Holliday’s email contained the Subject Line, “Important
information about Wikitravel” and its body stated, “This email is being sent to you
on behalf of the Wikitravel administrators since you have put some real time and
effort into working on Wikitravel. We wanted to make sure that you are up to
date and in the loop regarding big changes in the community that will affect the
future of your work! As you may already have heard, Wikitravel’s community is
looking to migrate to the Wikimedia Foundation.”

Re:Good

[DarwinSurvivor]

I don't think ANYONE wants to see that!

the 'wikitravel community' is not the same thing

[decora]

as the 'wikitravel company'. the company doesnt own the 'community'.

Trademarks vs. free speech

[tverbeek]

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.