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Internet Brands Sues People For Forking Under CC BY-SA

Posted by Soulskill on from the do-you-know-how-this-works dept.

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."

11 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Boycott! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:Boycott! by plover · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      I'd just say fork 'em.

      --
      John
  2. You get what you pay for by sabri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:You get what you pay for by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:You get what you pay for by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:You get what you pay for by bws111 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  3. Re:It's theirs no matter what they did with it. by devlogic · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  4. Private Equity Again by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  5. Re:Good by oakgrove · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  6. Re:It's theirs no matter what they did with it. by bws111 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Trademarks vs. free speech by tverbeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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/