How to Stop Commerial Use of Copyleft Materials? 232
An anonymous reader writes "The Guild Wiki, an extremely popular fan-made wiki for documenting the Masssively Multiplayer game Guild Wars, was originally supported by donations, then later advertisements — supposedly just enough to break even. Just the past week, the owner of the domain name surprised this wiki community by revealing that he had sold the domain name, the database, and his services to Wikia, a commercial entity that intends to profit from Guild Wiki's content. The catch? Much of Guild Wiki's content falls under Creative Commons by-nc-sa license, which denies the commercial use of licensed material. Arena.net created their own community run wiki to serve as the in-game help system, because they didn't think they could use the material on Guild Wiki commercially. If Wikia continues to serve ads over Guild Wiki's content, how can the thousands of contributors to the site stop them without going to the expense/trouble of hiring attorneys (or the crude path of mass vandalism)? If it turns out the site owner has been making a profit all along from ads, what's the remedy?"
DMCA (Score:5, Informative)
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, while /.ers are quite aware of DMCA takedown notices, most find their deployment a distasteful tactic at best. I don't think it is an issue of awareness so much as an issue of commitment to principles. While the tactic is normally employed by scary and disreputable corporate drones, the landscape becomes more complicated when it is employed by the so-called "little guys". Takedown notices are just a tool in an arsenal: Is it the tool itself that is the problem, or just the people who usually employ it?
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many insidious things about modern copyright legislation in various jurisdictions, but I don't think immediate take-down notices are among them. Such notices are a natural consequence of the need to protect copyright in a world of effectively instant, effectively free transmission of copies with widespread abuse. The notices are just a legal tool, and like all tools, the mechanism itself is neutral and it's how it's used that matters.
(Please don't challenge that "need" now: it's how the law works today, and I don't think this is an appropriate article for the wider discussion.)
It's the tool (Score:2)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)
There are very few tools in this world that are a problem if they are used by an informed conscientious individual, conversely there are very few tools that are safe when in the hands of a desperate megalomaniac.
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OTOH, you may want to reconsider the whole not hiring a lawyer thing. As I understand it, copyright cases in the US are unusual in that the plaintiff in a successful case can usual expect to get his lawyer's fees paid by the defendant. This seems to me to be a pretty clear-cut case. And likely a class action too, depending on how many contributors there were to the wiki. You will quite possibly find a lawyer willing to take on your
Re:DMCA (Score:5, Informative)
However, there's a big caveat. You cannot bring a regular copyright infringement suit in the US at all unless you've registered the work with the copyright office. It's a prerequisite to the suit, and it's common to just throw out cases where the plaintiff hasn't done that, with the understanding that he'll have to go back and do it before coming back to court.
However, the registration is also important in that if the work was unregistered at the time of the infringement, then statutory damages and costs and fees may not be awarded in the case (unless the work was published and unregistered at the time of the infringement, but registered within three months of its first publication, which is the one case where you get a little extra time).
Since the nature of a public wiki would make it annoying to register, at best, it's probably safe to expect that these remedies will never, in practice be available to the wiki group as a plaintiff, and that furthermore even after-the-fact registration just to get an injunction or actual damages and profits will be pretty difficult to manage. This is a known issue with these sorts of things (e.g. GPLed code where the copyrights aren't assigned to the FSF), but them's breaks.
Anyway, this being the case, getting a lawyer willing to take the case on contingency is incredibly unlikely.
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I was under the impression (obtained from that vast fountain of legal knowledge, the Internet) that it wasn't strictly necessary to register your work with the Copyright office. You could sue for larger damages if you did, but it was not actually required. Is this incorrect? Or is there some additional detail lurking in the word "regular" that isn't apparent?
Curious, sin
Re:DMCA (Score:4, Informative)
However, you cannot bring a suit for infringement unless you have registered your work prior to the filing of the suit. If you try to sue and have not already registered, the suit will be dismissed right off of the bat. This is a necessary prerequisite to any copyright infringement action.
Also, if the registration comes after the infringement, then you cannot get statutory damages. This means your damages are limited to the amount you were actually damaged (as opposed to being able to claim tens of thousands of dollars or more per work without proof of how much you were actually damaged) and also the profits made by the infringer attributable to the infringement. Nor can you get reasonable attorney's fees and costs.
There is one exception to that, in that if the infringement takes place after the first publication of the work, but before the registration, and the registration takes place within three months of the first publication of the work, then you can still claim any remedies.
Personally, I would advise people to register immediately, provided that they care about the copyright to a work. If you really don't care whether or not people do something which would constitute infringement, or at least don't care enough to bother registering (there is a simple form, a deposit requirement, and a modest fee), then don't bother. But realize that it will have significant repercussions.
The other thing you should always do is to place a proper copyright notice on works, again, if you care. It's helpful in preventing defendants from having a stronger case.
Sigh. (Score:2)
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You're confusing two separate things. In the US, under the current law, copyright vests in the author of a work upon creation. However, you still cannot actually bring an action for copyright infringement (with only a couple very minor exceptions) until you have registered, and the dates of first publica
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If you use an RIAA one for source make sure you remember to clearly the defendant and what they have done wrong though
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Wrong, it's NOT YOUR CONTENT. (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, now that everyone's in a tizzy, let's bring some reason back to the discussion.
First of all, almost every game out there, including Guild Wars, states in its terms of service that you can use their game content for non-commercial purposes. However, the content remains the property of the game company. That means that if, for example, you post an article in a wiki that contains verbatim descriptions of things found in-game or in documentation otherwise produced by the game company, which most articles are, you have absolutely no right whatsoever to make a DMCA claim because the content is not yours to begin with. If, and that's a huge if, anyone has a right to serve a takedown notice, it would be NCsoft, the owner of the IP for Guild Wars.
Second of all, I too own a popular gaming wiki for City of Heroes [paragonwiki.com], and I too am in the process of moving said wiki over to Wikia. There are many reasons, but among the top ones is the fact that the wiki is become too popular and is overloading my server. Response times are going down, pages aren't loading, and I'm already paying a decent sum of money every month out of my own pocket for a site that has clearly exceeded the capacity of a hobbyist site. At this point, I have one of three options:
Regarding option 1, I am not a salesman, nor do I ever want to be. Plus, I just want to concentrate on making the wiki a quality resource for the game's players, not making templates for ads and dealing with money transfers and all. Plus, as you can tell from the submitter's blurb, I don't want to have to deal with people accusing me of doing it for profit. Regarding option 3, I guess some might argue that it would be better to have the information lost forever or dispersed to the winds of the Internet so that it's a lot harder to find, but I don't think that making information less available is in the spirit of what the CC license is about, or the GFDL that the Paragon Wiki uses.
Third of all, all wikis are commercial at some point in the chain. For example, the hosting provider I'm currently using to host the Paragon Wiki isn't free. Could it be argued that because someone (i.e. my hosting provider) is making money off the wiki, it is therefore a commercial endeavor and must be removed? No, that's stupid. If you must, think of this change as the Paragon Wiki, and GuildWiki for that matter, simply changing hosting providers. Instead of me paying a hosting provider money, though, they are getting it through Google ads. I know some folks are going to be saying, "But he got paid and is getting company stock!" And I got paid, too. However, I think you're grossly overestimating the amount. In my talks with Wikia, they told me that they were going to reimburse me retroactively for my hosting costs for the wiki, to give me the money back that I sunk into it for the past couple of years. I did the math. Their number is actually slightly lower than the actual cost, but it's pretty close. I don't know the details (and don't care to) of how much Gravewit got for moving his sites over, but I strongly suspect that he's been paying more in hosting costs than I have, and that it was a similar arrangement, with the money plus the stock value being around the same as his retroactive hosting costs.
Fourth of all, the submitter's summary really portrays Wikia in a needlessly negative light. Can we please acknowledge that they are providing a valuable service here? They could pick and choose only sites that will make them millions in ad revenue to host, but that's not what they're doing. Anyone who wants to can start a new wiki [wikia.com] on any topic that they think would build a community, whether that's a community of a billion people or a community of a hundred. They provide gr
Re:Wrong, it's NOT YOUR CONTENT. (Score:5, Informative)
These aren't critiques. (Score:3, Informative)
Have you read most of the articles on these wikis? The vast majority of them are not critiques. They are, as I said, verbatim copies of texts and screenshots of images found within the games, or on official websites or within the game publishers' manuals. As such, the fair use protection doesn't apply.
At best, you might be able to come up with some kind of claim if you've used some sort of clever presentation of the information, but if you're just copied it over into a wiki, you most certainly have no
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True, but it never hurts to have it anyway.
But the real purpose of the ToS isn't to protect the company (thought that's probably part of it). These companies for the most part want people to use their content. Without allowable use like this, then there would not only be no game wikis, but no fansites, no fan art, etc. This is one of the rare cases where a ToS is more about what you can do than what you can't.
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So now you enter a whole new realm of intersting theory. We've got permission to use the source material and a derived work based upon that permission. For the game copy to "own" that derived work there must be an assignment, and the trick about assignments
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Here's an example... Everything here should be OK under fair use: http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Profession [gamewikis.org] (even the profession icons are custom, not ripped). Everything here should probably also be OK, because it's only a small cropped part of a screenshot: http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Weapon [gamewikis.org] . I'm not sure about things like these though, which has excessive quotes as you say: http://gw.gamewi [gamewikis.org]
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Just because you can use a portion of text under the Fair Use doctrine does not make that text's copyright yours. If you write a substantial article with fair use experts then the article is yours. On the other hand if you extract significant amount of in game text and format it nicely with a couple sentences of framing text you better have a good lawyer if you want to exert that you have copyright over that.
You're wrong about copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't disagree with you in priciple, but the fact is that the people who wrote the articles licensed them to the wiki under specific terms, and it has a legal obligation to follow them. They can always start again with their own work.
Other more friendly options (Score:2)
Before sending a DMCA take down notice, make a phone call to the guy in question and ask for what you want from him, or try to remove the content yourself from the wiki (with a short explanation identifying yourself of course). Usually, site owners are willing to honor their users requests -- even if it means losing a ton of good content -- I know, I've seen this done on a number of sites.
Using the hammer of the legal system before exhausting your other more friendly options is the wrong
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You will need a lawyer and buckets of money (Score:2)
You will need a lawyer and buckets of money to throw upon the legal fire you will create. Be prepared to be counter sued. Some guesses: Restraint of trade, interference with a contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress?
*NEVER* act without a lawyer ... (Score:2)
*NEVER* get involved in the legal system without a lawyer except for things like small claims court, traffic court, etc. You will "by definition" be acting as your own lawyer and therefore be a fool. Seriously, it can end up costing you far more than a couple of hundred buck for a short conversation with a lawyer. Sometimes you can get a consultation that includes advice for no charge.
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Think about how it would be sent too... (Score:2)
Copyright is for non-profits too (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure at some point in history "Copyright" was a cute, gimmicky made-up word used to connote the warm feeling of having "rights" to the idea of owning intellectual and artistic content. Then after heavy usage it became accepted as the proper word to refer to the concept, connotative baggage and all. Eventually that usage was even enshrined in the law. People make stuff up all the time; in language, reality is what people want it to be, more than in almost any other area.
I see no reason why "Cop
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Does the "left" in "Copyleft" have any meaning other than anti-copyright?
Re:Copyright is for non-profits too (Score:4, Funny)
Dunno, but whoever invented the term was being very sinister...
Mod Parent Hilarious (Score:2)
If there was ever an appropriate time for mod "Funny", the parent's post is it.
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Yeah, so does "Google it!", and I chuckle every time I hear a 50+ year old say it. (I don't know why exactly; I think my brain cannot process the absurd incongruity and simply malfunctions). And yet, there it is, in our language, probably to stay, just like Kleenex and Xerox. Sociopath is a really new word, replaced psychopath as preferred terminology and sort of filtered into regular use. 'Brainstorm' is only 50 years old, and upon reflection you must admit it sounds a trifle silly.
Euphemism and neologi
Re: (Score:2)
If you use a work that's under the GFDL, or a CC license, in a way that's not allowed by the license, then you are violating the author's copyright, since you no longer have permission to reproduce the work. (Fair use excepted.)
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Totally agree with you there, that copyleft is a specific form/implementation of copyright. What the GP was whining about was the idea that copyleft is a made-up word (whatever the hell that means...I'm pretty sure *all* words are made up) and thus somehow a less legitimate term than copyright. I'd say that copyleft is simply a descriptive term that means exactly what you said, and in that context, it is as legitimate as any other properly used word.
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How carefully is the license written? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How carefully is the license written? (Score:5, Informative)
Why speculate about the possible wording? The relevant wording from the license described is:
It seems to me that Wikia's use is almost certainly primarily intended for such a purpose.
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Re:How carefully is the license written? (Score:5, Informative)
The definiton of commercial is pretty vague at times, probably to keep lawyers in bussiness, but now site seems to be driven primarily by a profit motive, unlike the orgininal where the revenues were intended to offset expenses, so the first site was in a gray area, but the second is probably over the line. The poster should talk to a lawyer, maybe the EFF [eff.org] or legal aid would be interested.
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Changing the license was really bad form
Not only that, it was illegal. The only person who has the right to change the license is the copyright holder. If something is licensed under a particularly permissive license, you can possibly distribute copies with additional conditions (unless it's copyleft, like the GPL, and doesn't permit additional conditions, unless those additional conditions are explicitly allowed, as are a few in GPLv3). Most Free licenses contain the boilerplate 'copies must include...' indicating that the original license m
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Since making the first post and this one I did look more fully at the site in question and didn't see anythin
Re:How carefully is the license written? (Score:4, Interesting)
By definition, it is said, everything they do is primarily for profit.
Personally, I don't like seeing non-Free licenses called copyleft, but that is a different argument. "Copyleft - all rights reversed" just doesn't work well in that case.
all the best,
drew
http://openphoto.net/gallery/index.html?user_id=178 [openphoto.net]
Underwater Joy
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According to the generally accepted thought about the NC option (from what I gather) a for profit corporation cannot avail themselves of any NC based licenses whatsoever.
I don't think the license makes this claim and I've seen very little legal writing to support the conclusion. Certainly the license could have come out and said that, but it didn't... and probably for good reason. Consider google.org, a for-profit corporate entity, which makes zero dollars. I don't believe it would be prohibited from using NC materials. What about google.com... it does stuff that has no immediate financial gain... like blogger, for example. No ads there unless the blog writer wants
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Well, here you go;
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/DiscussionDraftNonCommercial_Guidelines [creativecommons.org]
Not that I disagree with your reasoning mind you. Go check the cc-licenses mailing list for many discussion re NC and how much fun it is.
NC is not something I would want to touch.
all the best,
drew
Re:How carefully is the license written? (Score:4, Funny)
It was written using a remote controlled non explosive pencil on an environment safe piece of paper in an bunker on a remote location. The writing speed was one letter per hour and the operator was located in an other timezone.
So I think it's safe to say it was very carefully written.
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Vandalism won't work. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't destroy a wiki with vandalism. A simple script can roll every single page back to a particular date, and then it can all be locked. You can ruin the community aspect of it, and presumably take away a great deal of the value assuming Wikia believe they're buying the community rather than merely the content, but if Wikia think the content is finished and in a state where they can sell it (through advertising) then there's little that can be done.
Except...
The authors of the wiki pages are the owners of their content, and as such they're free to put their content onto the other wiki. They're free to put it onto 1000 other wikis. With some SEO expertise it should be possible to make Wikia's purchase completely worthless because noone would ever see it, so noone would ever view any of their adverts.
The terms of the license... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The terms of the license... (Score:4, Interesting)
The user just have to walk away (Score:2)
Wikia is run by the wikipedia founder (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, Jimbo Wales is no idiot about Wikis (and seemed very down to earth guy when I met him). As much as this might be legal wrangling in the hands of the original owner, if I were a contributor I wouldn't be calling my lawyers. The ideal solution would be for the Wikia folks to ask for CC-SA (striking the NC) relicensing from all authors - in a classic King Solomon solution, by putting up a static data dump on torrents & offering to take down content of any contributor who objects from the wiki version.
But not the lawyers
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My guess would be yes. If they used BY-NC-SA instead of BY-SA, it would possibly be because they do expect money is someone should make commercial use of the work.
I myself think NC makes for poor licenses, but none the less...
I personally prefer GPL and BY-SA though I am not fully happy with BY-Sa as it stands. (Not commenting on the GPL happiness at all.)
all the best,
drew
http://rukiddinmez.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
R U Kiddin
Easy (Score:2, Insightful)
Copyleft does not try to prevent commercial use (Score:4, Informative)
Why the change of heart (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why the change of heart (Score:5, Insightful)
What different about this when it comes to..... (Score:4, Interesting)
1) come out with useful but buggy software
2) have buying customers users report bugs and make suggestions for improvements
3) sell upgrades back to them.
4) don't pay them for any of their work
5) Copyright and patent teh improvements you got from the users.
6) do like autodesk, don't allow the customer/users to sell their used software.
Here you have game players doing a bunch of documentation for free on a game that is commercial.
The web site made money off of the unpaid efforts of the documentators efforts in on site advertising and the sale of the site.
step Seven:
lock down the documentation and site and require all contributors to pay a monthly fee for access.
How can the contributors respond?
Copy the site to another location and sue the pants off of any attempt to stop this.
Using the DMCA to shut the site down is contradictory to the original intent of the contributors.
Consumer deception was applied by the site owner.
This seems straightforward... (Score:4, Insightful)
From the FP, it sounds like you have two separate situations here.
First, you had free hosting that came with a domain name (and probably some form of basic administration in the setting up of the Wiki and keeping it running smoothly - Though your community may have separated those four "services").
Second, you have user-provided CC-nc content that happens to live on the above-provided set of services.
Your community (individually, keep in mind) "owns" the latter. You have no rights at all to the former (though your could argue the domain name itself as a trademark, I highly doubt you registered it as such, and the courts always favor the party who will actually use it for, y'know, "trade" over any nonprofit use.
So as much as you may object to this change, no one has actually violated your copyrights, yet. Your domain owner and admin sold their services, not your content ("the database" can have multiple meanings; you should generally presume a legal one until proven otherwise). Thus, you have two choices, as I see it:
1) Do nothing, and accept banner ads as the price of your hosting.
2) Inform the new owner of your intent, as a group, to disallow them the use of your content. Begin removing it from the current servers and move it elsewhere (a variation of what you called "mass vandalism").
In the case of #2, if Wikia starts doing massive rollbacks to "preserve" content you have every right to remove, then you can cry copyright infringement, and may want to hire a lawyer (this seems like a perfect class-action situation, if you can get anyone to take the case for such small stakes, since you don't actually want any cash for it, you just want an injunction against use of it by Wikia). They may, however, play it perfectly fair. They might expect to lose 10-25% of the community, and treat the rest well enough to stay and even recover over a few months.
But mostly, you should probably wait for an actual infringement before crying wolf.
The language is not ambiguous (Score:2)
This seems pretty clear to me:
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Unless the site owner had an agreement outside the content license (ToS?) then he had no right to license the content to anyone else or sell it to anyone else. IMHO the only relevant question is whether the purpose of the site is commercial.
If it's hosted in the US a DMCA take-down notice should be adequate to get your material off the site. If it's in Germany, that's an interesting question. I'm not sur
This raises a question (Score:2)
Other replies have spoken about scraping this particular site's CC content and copying it to another wiki. That's fine if you can get to the content, but what if a hypothetical site abruptly converted to a fee-for-access format? Obviously you'd then need to either pay to recover what should be freely available, or scrape the data from someplace else, such as Google's cache or the Internet Archive. That assumes, however, that the content is available from those places, which could be prevented by adding s
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All this said, your question about "but what if a hypothetical site abruptly converted to a fee-for-access format?" is a vaild p
Usenet archives (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny. A while ago, probably not long after Google bought out Deja News, there was some bad feeling from Usenet contributors who felt that their content had been sold, and others were basically profiteering on the back of their work. A few custom services were also popping up, which reproduced the content on certain Usenet groups but splatted those irritating ad-links all over key words in the content. When I suggested that this was inappropriate in a discussion here, a whole load of people basically told me to STFU because once I'd posted the content on Usenet I should have known that was going to happen.
I pointed out that at the time Deja started keeping its archive, I (and many others) would not necessarily have been aware of it, and might reasonably have expected articles to expire after a few days (as they did at the time on pretty much all ISPs' Usenet servers). I was directed to the relevant RFCs and told that they said content could be kept effectively indefinitely, and that this was more important than the industry standard practice at the time that users would actually have experienced.
I pointed out that the only licence anyone had to copy my and others' copyrighted content from Usenet was the implicit one granted by posting in the first place, and that it was questionable whether this covered commercial use or for that matter the RFC-sanctioned archival if most people using the system didn't know that could happen. This, too was our problem, I was told.
I pointed out that splatting the hyperlink ads all over the content degraded the content and certainly would not be expected on a normal Usenet system. This, apparently, was just fair use, and the fact that US-style fair use doesn't even apply in my country (where some of the material was being posted) didn't matter.
The critics' conclusion: Too bad, get over it, you have no legal rights.
My conclusion #1: Don't ask Slashdot about legal rights, ask a lawyer.
My conclusion #2: Expect to get screwed by unethical/illegal business practices if you put your content on-line anywhere but you don't have big enough legal guns to defend it afterwards. But you should take what steps you can to minimise the effort required to defend your rights: including the non-commercial clause that applies here, for example.
My prediction: In the current, Web 2.0-ish world full of community-made content, there's going to be a lot of bad feeling sooner or later, as the numerous businesses who basically just host discussion facilities but then claim rights over the content start profiteering, potentially at the expense of those who wrote the material in the first place. The so-called "you write all the content, they keep all the money" model is a great deal for businesses but a lousy deal for the contributors, who tend to suffer from some idealistic illusion that their content is safe and the service they are supporting will continue to operate for their benefit even if it's not making enough money. A lot of people's feelings are going to get hurt as this happens more often, and this case is just the start.
My answer: If you want to share content on-line, always host it on your own terms. Don't use a commercial service for your blog, set up your own. It's almost as cheap and easy these days, and then there's no ambiguity about the ongoing hosting, the rights to the material, or the privacy implications of someone else holding potentially substantial amounts of personal data. If you want to set up a community site with friends, get a friendly geek to help you do so with your own web host, for the same reasons.
Not A Clear Violation. Why Sweat It? (Score:5, Insightful)
The relevant part of the license is the following:
For starters I don't like this wording at all. It grants a right that is conditioned on the intent of the entity exercising the license which makes it horribly vague. Now obviously this passage prohibits the sale of the material (e.g. give me five bucks I'll give you this content) but what this means for other uses (like advertising) is extremely problematic. Moreover, it would be very very harmful if the courts read this license to prohibit the use of the material in a way that lets one gain commercial benefits because of the mere interest and popularity of the work.
Suppose for instance a bunch of documentation is released under this licensce for some open source software. If any use requiring the license that is motivated by commercial advantage even if the compensation is only indirect is bared then IBM would be barred from paying some of it's employees from adding to the documentation on the wiki. Sure the result of their action is just to help the project like anyone else but they motivation is to gain commercial advantage by improving documentation for their customers (along with everyone else) and they had to use the license to make the modifications (derivative work). Nor could any such project be hosted on google code or take advantage of google's summer of code. After all google's motivation in both projects is to elevate their corporate image and thus give them a competitive advantage. Hell, even contributing to the project to impress your boss or to learn how to write/code so you can get a better job would be banned.
Of course you could try to weasel about the meaning of the word "primarily intended" to avoid these consequences but then companies like this could do the same. If you get to weasel on this word they can simply weasel and say something like "yes we want to make profit but our primary intention is just to provide a commercially stable distribution mechanism for this product and that requires being a profitable company." There just isn't any good way to distinguish using the copyright to draw page views which draw ad revenue from using the copyright to look good so you draw customers without explicit language in the license to make this distinction. You can't make the license mean "whatever I find objectionable is off limits."
Ultimately I think we are all better off if the non-commercial aspect of this license is interpreted narrowly, i.e, it stops you from charging admission to a play you are putting on with this material, putting it on a CD and charging for that CD or other direct exchanges of value for the work. As for what you do in situations like this one, you don't whine about it.
I understand the motivation for not wanting people to charge for your work or to otherwise turn your work into a commercial product but that's not what's happening here. Intuitively (though not legally) this company isn't behaving much differently than google (or slashdot in hosting our comments). They are aren't suggesting that the content isn't free or making sure you have to pay them for the work. They are just making a profit in return for hosting the material. If you don't like the ads the obvious solution is to set up an ad free alternative.
Dealing with the problem (Score:2)
To that extent, you may remove -YOUR- works if you still have the power or demand their removal via a DMCA takedown if you've been shut out. You may also sue, however without a registered copyri
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That's not true at all. You can condition the license under which they may use your work. If the license said that they have to pay you so much or else the license terminates, and they don't pay,
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Only if they express acceptance of your profferred license. That decision is entirely within their control. The only thing you control is whether or not they're permitted to use your works. As I said.
I you can cite an appellate case where the terms a license were held to be binding and enforceable despite the defendant's explicit rejection of the full license, I'll read the decision with great interest.
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Really, the only way that someone can lawfully engage in acts which otherwise fall under the exclusive rights of copyright without permission from the copyright holder (which, as we seem to have agreed, can be conditioned) is if there's an applicable exception.
EFF ? (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure that the EFF is there to promote *liberties* not *anti-community-restrictions* like the CC NC clause.
You can't (Score:2)
Either suck it up, sue, or fork.
Fault with the owner (Score:2)
Your Own Catch 22 (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a farse. (Score:2)
Someone's making MONEY?! (Score:2)
Sounds impossible to do legally (Score:2)
This was why ArenaNet handled things differently. They did it this way: Started wiki.guildwars.com as the official Guild Wars wiki, that is instead
Re:The first step: (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course seller here can hammer Wikia with a "you bought a bill of goods and didn't do your *due diligence* on the subject, and are thus to blame for buying what you can't sell".
Irony at its best, but then again, this is slashdot, I wonder how many of you can actually negociate contracts
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If Offer==true && Acceptance==true then {fulfill conditions of accord} else {offer acceptable Remedy}
This was the main cause why you had to KNOW your business partners. You can ask them (whether they were good men or scumbags) to "honor" their bargains all day long, but it was YOUR duty to find out what you were offered.
I can offer you brand X crap, a
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The content in this case might have a specific type of license. But if the content in itself was sold, then the buyer would have to know that the seller had the ability to sell it. If he didn't and the license forbids the new owner from doing anything with it, then fraud had hap
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Now, I wouldn't be sure that using content that can't be used to commercial gain would preclude advertising on the sites it would be hosted on.
And there is the main point. Is Wikia (and the previous owner) selling the Content of the wiki, or are they using the free wiki contents as a means to attract people to sell them other things? The first is clearly a commercial use: I sell the content and pocket the money. The second might be commercial, but not directly involving the copyright holders: I offer free content with pay ads surrounding it, you can still see the free content and pay nothing if you so choose.
To use the home seller analo
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Care to tell me that I'm better off butting heads with some idiot in court and paying a lawyer to save me 30 minutes of due diligence???
If something is preventable then why go through court to justify something, and damaging one's health through stress and h
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If some guy I meet on the street sells me the Brooklyn Bridge, and I proceed to erect a toll booth, can I defend against those who say that I cannot put my toll booth there by saying that the seller misrepresented his ownership of the bridge to me?
The owners of the copyrighted material have a claim against anyone who is using their work in a means against the license. Wikia's belief that they are acting in good-
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There are no punitive damages unless one of the contributors actually filed a copyright on their material within 90 days of publication. All the original autho
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Huh? What license do you suggest for people writing articles in a Wiki? And how would that license make it easier/better for the author to get rewarded in this situation?
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Maybe I'm missing something here but copyright is the foundation the various licenses(cc, gpl, bsd, etc) are built on. A license is terms under which the author permits others to distribute his work.
I think what you are trying to saying is you would claim ownership of all material & submissions. This would be posted in the site's "Terms of Usage".
The most obvi
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Big difference between GPL and CC-BY-NC-* (Score:5, Insightful)
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Our problem as
But it isn't linking; it's reproduction. (Score:2)
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The point everyone seems to miss is that the works are *not* licensed to GuildWiki under the Creative Commons license. GuildWiki licenses the material to the general public under the CC license.
Under the TOS, contributers license GuildWiki the right to produce derivative works without -- as far as I can tell any restrictions except that GuildWiki's subsequent licensing of the material must under CC non-commercial.
Someone purchasing GuildWiki's rights would not be a sub-licensor. They would step into Gui
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