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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?"
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.
I think there's a bit of confusion with these sites that I agree should be cleared up.
It's not that the authors are licensing the content to the service under the CC-BY-NC license - more often than not, they're just giving the content to the service with no strings attached whatsoever.
The service then applies a CC-BY-NC license to that content for third parties to make use of, but that doesn't mean the service can't change the license around at a later time.
Because authors just gave the content away freely and willingly (albeit perhaps not knowingly, in terms of the extent), they don't really have grounds for complaint other than moral grounds.
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.
Wrong. Since the website doesn't have permission under copyright law to use the content, the only thing that allows Wikia to publish content they didn't create is the license under which editors have given them such permission. Users *are* licensing the content to the service under the CC-BY-NC license - they're contributing to a derivative work published under that license, so the combined work must be under the license per the terms of the CC.
So the "willingly giving" of content was provided under a very specific license, which is the reason why many users bother to contribute at all. Not honoring the license is not only morally wrong, it's also illegal.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
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 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.
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.
You'd better as hell request an explicit permission to distribute the code from any contributor to your code base, and clarify in the post forms the conditions under which any contribution can be used.
what they actually did was contribute to a codebase - a codebase under my control, and one that I can slap any which license on that I like.
Utterly wrong. Under copyright laws, you can only relicense content that you created, or for which you've been given explicit ownership permissions; if Somebody gave you the code only under the original GPL and didn't assign copyright to you, in order to relicense the code you must first remove any such contribution, so that the result only contains the parts you wrote - otherwise, you'll break their copyright.
This is what is going on in both wikis - the only license under which they published their work at first was the CC-BY-SA (or CC-BY-NC for some Wikias), which is the reason for the sites becoming popular in the first place as many users wouldn't bother to contribute under more restrictive licenses; and neither site requested ownership rights until recently.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
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?