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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?"
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.
Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.
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.
Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.
Well, you could argue that some people do altruistic acts because it rewards them with a good feeling, similar to how others feel good about amassing money or power or being desired, so ultimately egoistic motivation. The trick is to have a culture and organization of society that makes the best out of peoples different egoistic motivations.
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.
Unless you transferred copyright you absolutely can - if you licensed content under the CC-BY-NC then only *you* can change the license terms, and Wikia is acting illegally if it uses your content in a commercial setting. You don't have *exclusive* rights to collaborative content, but unless they strip out *everything* you contributed they can't relicense without your permission. That's one of the reasons that Linux, for example, is firmly committed to GPLv2 - Linus stripped out the "or any later version" relicensing option, and now there's so many poorly documented contributors that there's no way they could track all of them down to get permission to relicense, so it's GPLv2 forever.
Of course you'd probably have to sue, or at least present a credible threat of such, to get Wikia back in line, and that's liable to be expensive, but that's what class-actions are for - after all it's not just your content they're stealing, it's *everyone* who contributed under -NC terms, and they're no doubt counting on collective apathy to get away with it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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?
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.
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.
Ah yes, blame "the West". Of course the East has been a bastion of wisdom, equality and selfless generosity for a long time now. The South did not fare so well, being too busy being sold off by the West into slavery, which the West invented of course.
Or maybe selfishness is just human nature and a thing of all times.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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?
Ha, I'm Canadian! We in the North laugh at your petty squabbles and selfish greed!
I wonder if it'll stop snowing soon?
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.
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