Slashdot Mirror
Wikia and Sony Playing Licensing Mind Tricks
TuringTest (533084) writes "Popular culture website Wikia originally hosted its user-contributed content under a free, sharealike Commercial Commons license (CC-BY-SA). At least as soon as 2003, some specific wikis decided to use the non-commercial CC-BY-NC license instead: hey, this license supposedly protects the authors, and anyone is free to choose how they want to license their work anyway, right? However, in late 2012 Wikia added to its License terms of service a retroactive clause for all its non-commercial content, granting Wikia an exclusive right to use this content in commercial contexts, effectively making all CC-BY-NC content dual-licensed. And today, Wikia is publicizing a partnership with Sony to display Wikia content on Smart TVs, a clear commercial use. A similar event happened at TV Tropes when the site owners single-handedly changed the site's copyright notice from ShareAlike to the incompatible NonCommercial, without notifying nor requesting consent from its contributors. Is this the ultimate fate of all wikis? Do Creative Commons licenses hold any weight for community websites?"
Any site claiming so is lying. The owners want mindshare and eyeballs, i.e. you. You are the ultimate product despite whatever you may believe about a site. The owners how to get a large enough audience to get noticed by a bigger player, who them will come in and buy the business. The owners leave to live a happy wealthy life, the users, bitch and moan as normal.
I know Jimbo is a vile, leeching Objectivist ex-pornographer who has created the worst popular web site on the Internet, but he's not influential enough to be above the law. The copyright belongs to the authors, and nobody else can change the license.
1. IANAL, and, while I'm quite familiar with a lot of copyright issues, I can't venture an expert opinion about whether the license conversions would actually stand up to a lawsuit.
2. That being said, if you're creating and editing content on someone else's website, you've got to face the risk that the content might end up being used in ways of which you don't approve.
So what do the actual copyright owners say?
The people who put stuff on those sites under a CC-BY-NC license?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
More or less the same thing happened with Gracenote as I recall.
Lots of people created the content in CCDB, and then the organization took it private and said "ours now".
Sooner or later, it seems like every entity which relies on other people to make their content decide that they now own it and can make it closed.
It's a great business model, but it pretty much screws over the people who actually built your product.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
CC-BY-NC licensed Wiki's are not included in content presented by Sony apps (only CC-BY-SA ones are). Disclaimer: I used to work for Wikia on this project so have first hand info about this.
CC NC restriction is stupid, because it is really ambiguous and it's hard to say what "non-commercially" means; in fact, most interesting non-personal uses qualify as "commercial", including non-profit uses, public media, any personal blog that might carry adsense etc. If one says "NC", you imagine things like evil people putting your content to a shiny book and making tons of money on that, but in reality it makes the work difficult to incorporate or remix in much anything.
That said, relicencing without the consent of contributors is simply illegal, and if you care enough, sue. Relicencing is hard work, and in the context of open source software, people tend to be rather careful; relicencing VLC or OSM was an interesting, read up on that. But in principle, it is doable (at the cost of dropping some fringe content). An imperfect best-effort solution to show you at least try to do it properly: run per-word blame on current revisions; ignore users with only tiny coverage (small contributions aren't covered by copyright, roughly speaking); harrass the large contributors to relicence until you have 80% coverage, then redact the rest and call it a day. Of course, the "harrassing" part may take months, but that's life.
If you want to be future-proof, ask your users during registration about licence of their work. Default on something very permissive like CC-0 (they may not care if it's small stuff) / CC-BY and let them opt in to declare they release it only under CC-BY-SA or (at worst) CC-BY*-NC. You can still publicly serve the compiled wiki content under CC-BY-SA, that doesn't conflict with the fact that the guys are licencing it as CC-0 / CC-BY to *you*. But if in the future you decide you need to change the licence, you'll have the headroom to do it easily.
The problem is that many people don't understand the impact that license changes can have on content and how it is used. This can happen both with large wikis, and with smaller ones. For instance, I started the Wikia page for the game Spelunky, back when it was still a freeware PC game. It started out as just me and one or two other people writing all of the content. I pretty much stopped editing it when the console version of the game was released because I did not have a compatible console at the time.
When I started the Wikia page, I wasn't thinking about what my content (or forks thereof) would be licensed under. I mostly just wanted to make a central repository for information about the game. I haven't read the CC-BY-SA license, nor have I read CC-BY-NC, because I didn't believe there would be any danger of someone using the wiki for commercial reasons due to Spelunky being a freeware game.
Would I prefer my content remain free and sharealike? Yes. Can I do anything about Wikia getting kickbacks from Sony to display content I wrote on a TV? Probably not, and in any case it'd be unethical since I didn't write 100% of the content even on the Wikia I started.
After the Sony root kit fiasco and the way Sony left users of the Cli Palm OS devices high and dry with NO warning,
Sony deserves no business from anyone who would like to call himself an informed tech person.
FUCK SONY.
And if you spend any money with Sony after what Sony has done, fuck YOU.
This is exactly the problem with "NC". To you, this is "clear commercial use". Is it because a big company is involved? Two companies? We assume money is changing hands, but... maybe it's not. The license says "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation". What if the money goes towards "supporting the community"? What exactly is "commercial advantage" in this context? I'd have to ask a lawyer, and... unless I was paying them to advise on a specific case, I doubt they'd actually give a straight answer.
Overall, "noncommercial" licenses are problematic and should be avoided. I understand the intention, but it's hard to make a license that actually gets there.
These are not the licenses you're looking for. Move along
It's a great business model, but it pretty much screws over the people who actually built your product.
...this phrase describes basically every business model, ever.
This comes up every now and then, some site decides it wants to own all user posted content and changes their terms of service to pave the way for them to sell it. This invariably causes a massive backlash amongst the users which usually forces the site to back off from most of it's IP grab. Instagram did this right after being gobbled up by Facebook and resulted in a class-action lawsuit being filed by people wanting their copyrights back (they did the whole retroactive ownership thing too). I didn't hear what the outcome was so assume the case is still being litigated.
Generally I don't think any kind of retroactive claim of ownership will stand up in court.
That being said, if you're creating and editing content on someone else's website, you've got to face the risk that the content might end up being used in ways of which you don't approve.
You can always host stuff on your own website. Even then someone might use your content, and you're out of luck because they can pay their lawyers indefinitely and you're just a guy with a website.
Now that the wiki and Sony partnership is formed think of the benefits copywriters will gain from the feature of TV commercials included for their content. Furthermore their reach is also going to expand dramatically if the Tv Commercial part becomes successful on a grand scale. But not everything just as planned Lets see what happens.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2000 Andover.Net.
FUCK THAT GUY.
That BMW looks pretty nice and hosting free shit for free doesn't pay for a BMW. I wish these companies would be more honest about it when they finally do decide to fuck everyone over, though. Really, how hard is it to say "Yeah, we decided we wanted a BMW"? Or "Yeah, our CEO needs a fifth house." or "We're firing all those guys because our CEO is planning to cash out a fuck-ton of stock options this year and wants three million dollars instead of two." Since no one has any privacy anymore anyway, they may as well be honest about their reasons. It's not like we won't find out a couple months later anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You're putting stuff on THEIR systems. So you're supposedly going to trust them?
They can't even keep their stupid adware system malware free on a month-by-month basis. And you think that's an ACCIDENT?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This applies only if contributors provide their contributions under the License. TV Tropes Foundation now claims that contributors provide provide their contributions not under the License but instead under assignment of copyright: "By contributing content to this site, whether text or images, you grant TV Tropes irrevocable ownership of said content, with all rights surrendered" except for fair use. So TV Tropes Foundation becomes the copyright owner, and it licenses your edits back to you under the License.
"By contributing content to this site, whether text or images, you grant TV Tropes irrevocable ownership of said content, with all rights surrendered" in the welcome page looks an awful lot like an assignment of copyright.
"...playing the odds that the insured would not consult an attorney."
People who don't own their own businesses or aren't involved in the higher levels of a corporation don't realize that much of business behavior is defined by the expectation of the likelihood of being sued.
Of course they can't legally just retroactively f*** everyone over, but who is going to stop them when they're likely privately indemnified by SONY.
That's just one of the negatives of capitalism - most people try to get away with everything they can. A modified form of consequentialism.
Loading...
Delete your wiki edits/comments, so they cannot claim ownership of what you wrote.
Displaying content on a tv doesn't make it commercial you fucking retards.
Iv'e added a retroactive clause to my browser the supersedes the Wikia and Tropes copyright claims that says I own all the content I create through that browser and do not surrender any copyright when I add content to a wiki, wikia, message board, facebook or any other website.
Even now it's possible to just make a good product, treat your employees right, and sell it for a fair price.
Some personal examples in the woodworking tools category: Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, Veritas Tools.
And the legal opinion there was that to switch licenses would require the approval of every copyright holder.
By contributing to the codebase they did not actually assign you copyright...so each contributor holds copyright in the portion that they actually wrote.
More or less the same thing happened with Gracenote as I recall.
However, that doesn't really address any of the issues that GP raised.
IANAL either, but generally speaking, a "licensing agreement" is a contract. And again generally speaking, one is not allowed to change the terms of a contract and make them "retroactive". At least not without the consent of all parties involved. If you did, it would no longer meet the very definition of "contract".
I mean, just think about it. Could your cable company say "We're going to make you a 'retroactive' customer and charge you for all past years as well"??? Of course not.
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img834/5919/2omn.png
Farewell Sony
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img834/5919/2omn.png
Goes back to being selfish, the people who started these sites may never have had the best intentions in mind to begin with, or they did however once they saw the potential to make money from it, it corrupted their morals/principles.
I really didn't read the linked story, but I do not see a problem with this, Wikia doesn't run itself, you have expenses that need to be paid in order to keep it going besides donations and people willfully and freely supporting the site by donating their time to add/edit articles. If the money is going into the site itself I do not see a problem with this, however if the people in charge of the site are pocketing the money or acting similar to book publishers then I see a problem with it.
Having said that if that is the case then this submitted article is just really sensationalism by someone who fails to see the bigger picture, keeping a site going, without clogging it with bought-&-paid for articles, or annoying worthless advertising.
My sites free. I pay to host it. Anyones free to go there, download my content. I've no intention of ever applying ANY license to any of it. You can even use it for commercial purposes if you like. I don't care. If you want to be nice you should throw in an attribution though.
If you don't apply an explicit license, standard copyright applies, and that is "all rights reserved, no copying allowed beyond fair use." I'd recommend applying the CC-BY license or the GNU All-Permissive License to your pages.
Your post raises some interesting questions I don't see addressed elsewhere in this thread:
Every user-content-driven site presumably has terms of service which dictate how your contributions can be used. For example, let's say you upload a picture to be used on a UserContentEncyclopedia.com article and you specify the license. UserContentEncyclopedia.com then changes their ToS to say anyone who contributes content to UserContentEncyclopedia.com henceforth or in the past grants them a waiver to use it for commercial purposes, regardless of the terms of the license originally granted.
1. If the ToS also says, "your use of this site signifies your acceptance of these terms", how do you signify that you don't accept? Never visit the site again?
2. If you never "use" the site again, will UserContentEncyclopedia.com realize this, and refrain from using your past contributions commercially since you haven't signified acceptance of the terms? Or will UserContentEncyclopedia.com assume that the continued presence of your past contributions constitutes "use"?
3. Does any site with ToS actually keep track of which registered users have accepted updated ToS?
4. Have ToS clauses such as (1) ever been tested in court, and judged to form the basis of a legally binding contract?
5. What if I don't accept the implied contract that merely visiting a website constitutes acceptance of its ToS?
6. Could someone use the reasoning in (5) to claim they don't accept the implied contract that signing their name on a physical paper contract constitutes acceptance of the terms therein?
Well, an EULA is a contract. Courts have upheld that the terms of an EULA can be changed arbitrarily by the ones who issued it.
Since you've already agreed to the changes they make in the future, you're hosed.
Give them time, they're trying. The *AAs would like nothing better than mandatory payment by everybody on the off beat chance they ever see or hear anything.
I'm not advocating it, or saying I agree with it. But retroactively changing the TOS and license for a web site ... well, there's already precedent.
Trust me, I don't disagree with you. But, the reality is, it's more or less already happening, and the courts have pretty much upheld it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I wasn't aware of TV Tropes' attempt to change the licensing terms a couple of years back. Had I known, I would already have had a contemptious view of them (since *my* first thought too was that "you can't simply (legally) relicense CC content under new terms unless the contributors agree or you make it clear"- and, as the article writer pointed out, no such terms were presented or agreed to by me when adding edits.)
Even so, I was already unimpressed with a trick I caught them using a couple of months or so back. I noticed that they had added small, square pictures containing links to other articles at the bottom of some pages. Nice, you might think, but mixed in with these pictorial links (alternating in a checkerboard pattern) were links to external sites, i.e. adverts.
What made this morally dubious was that the advertising links and internal article links were of very similar style, both image and caption-wise, and it was quite clear that they were being intermingled with the intent of looking like links to TV Tropes articles and getting people to click on them.
Not in the same ballpark as their attempt to re-appropriate (i.e. steal) people's work for their own use only, but still an indicator of how sleazy the people who run this apparently friendly site are.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
1. If the ToS also says, "your use of this site signifies your acceptance of these terms", how do you signify that you don't accept? Never visit the site again?
2. If you never "use" the site again, will UserContentEncyclopedia.com realize this, and refrain from using your past contributions commercially since you haven't signified acceptance of the terms? Or will UserContentEncyclopedia.com assume that the continued presence of your past contributions constitutes "use"?
3. Does any site with ToS actually keep track of which registered users have accepted updated ToS?
4. Have ToS clauses such as (1) ever been tested in court, and judged to form the basis of a legally binding contract?
5. What if I don't accept the implied contract that merely visiting a website constitutes acceptance of its ToS?
6. Could someone use the reasoning in (5) to claim they don't accept the implied contract that signing their name on a physical paper contract constitutes acceptance of the terms therein?
These are some very good points; you should at least get an account so that they start at a Score of +1 or +2 instead of 0, and are more likely to be seen.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Migrating a wiki to your server? Tough shit, Wikia won't let you delete the one they're hosting.
A brain that rewards itself with a "good feeling" whenever it takes actions that benefit others without an overt reciprocal benefit is, by any useful definition, an "altruistic brain."
Saying "you get a good feeling and therefore you are selfish," is silly, since there is a clear difference between a "selfish" person who exploits the poor and a "selfish" (sic) person who gives generously to the poor.
1. IANAL, and, while I'm quite familiar with a lot of copyright issues, I can't venture an expert opinion about whether the license conversions would actually stand up to a lawsuit.
2. That being said, if you're creating and editing content on someone else's website, you've got to face the risk that the content might end up being used in ways of which you don't approve.
1. It wouldn't, the terms under which you created the content would stand. New content if you continued contributing would be under the new terms but your old content cannot have the terms changed retroactively.
The problem here is that enforcing such requires time, money, and lawyers. Guess who just partnered up with a big corporate giant to ensure they have more of that than you?
2. In theory if the content is used in ways which you do not approve of or have not agreed to (keeping in mind you 'agreed' to the ToS by posting the content in all likely hood) you can demand its removal. Remember copyright is default, you don't have to file for it, you own your comments/posts.
I say in theory because this brings us right back to time, money, and lawyers.
I think I have heard this story of a group playing fast and loose with people's free contributions and then selling out to Sony: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB
Well, an EULA is a contract. Courts have upheld that the terms of an EULA can be changed arbitrarily by the ones who issued it.
Show us any such decisions that don't depend on an EULA that has a term along the lines of "Company can vary the terms of this agreement at any time without notice." Note that no such term occurs in any of the license agreements that are discussed in this article.
Since you've already agreed to the changes they make in the future, you're hosed.
Not necessarily. At least here in the UK, courts have generally held that you have an automatic right to cancel the contract if the vendor attempts to vary its terms, even if you've already agreed to allow them to vary them. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a similar decision in the US; the situation otherwise makes a mockery of the entire legal theory behind what a contract actually is ("a meeting of minds where two parties agree to perform some specific future actions on the expectation that the other will also comply with the agreement" or similar).
Well, an EULA is a contract. Courts have upheld that the terms of an EULA can be changed arbitrarily by the ones who issued it.
Not only is that a very gross generalization, it is untrue in almost all cases.
First off, a EULA is a license agreement for use of a product. ToS is for a service. That's not nitpicking, it is in fact an extremely important difference.
I studied EULAs rather extensively in Business Law at university. Their history is interesting and also legally very important. As it turns out, EULAs have been tried by the manufacturers and distributors for just about every kind of product in existence. There was even a manufacturer of garden shovels that tried to put a EULA on the label.
The courts ruled very consistently that if it is a retail product, EULAs are invalid. You plunked down your money, you own the product, you can use it however you like. (As long as that use is otherwise legal, of course. You aren't allowed to murder anyone with your shovel.)
This concept held in every significant case. Not only that, they ruled that a EULA was not valid even if it was clearly legible and on the outside of the package before purchase.
An exception was when you had a prior agreement, such as a licensing agreement with a manufacturer to receive products direct. But... that's not retail, and it's a prior licensing agreement!
So then along came software. And some software companies with deep pockets managed to finagle a few lower courts into ruling that software EULAs were enforceable (against pretty much all legal precedent). BUT -- and this is very important -- when those lower court rulings were appealed, the software suppliers invariably settled rather than let the cases be appealed. BECAUSE they know they'll lose. Legal precedent for well over 100 years says so.
Also, since software is a written work under copyright law, the First Sale Doctrine very clearly says EULAs are invalid on their face.
That's a rising form of advertising. This one was Taboola. It's very annoying and the internal links to TVT were the pervy tropes 9 times out of 10.