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Wikia and Sony Playing Licensing Mind Tricks

Posted by timothy on from the thanks-for-the-help dept.

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?"

2 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. CC-BY-NC are excluded by szumo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Creating Content on Someone Else's Site Has Ris by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?