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TV Tropes Relicensed its Content - Without Permit

posted by Woods on Thursday May 15 2014, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the content-of-this-article-is-SFW dept.

LowID writes:

In the beginning, pop culture wiki TV Tropes licensed its content with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license for free content.

When Google pulled out its AdSense revenue because of... let's call it NSFW fan fiction, TV Tropes changed its guidelines to forbid tropes about mature content. In response to this move, two forks were eventually created. The admins disliked this move so much that they changed its license notice to the Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike version, despite their site not having requested copyright rights from their users. Only later they added a clause to their Terms of use page requiring all contributors to grant the site irrevocable, exclusive ownership of their edits.

I suppose the morale of the story is, if you contributed to TV Tropes before summer 2012, you should know they're distributing your content under a license that you didn't give them permission to use.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16 2014, @07:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16 2014, @07:56AM (#44126)

    I knew TV Tropes, but I had never heard about those forks, until now. If TV Tropes had not changed the license, I probably would not have heard about the forks at all. Also, while the banning of NSFW stuff would not have bothered me much (although NFSW stuff by itself wouldn't have either), that license change which happens to be both illegal and immoral certainly means I'll avoid using tvtropes in the future. I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling like this.

  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 16 2014, @04:01PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Friday May 16 2014, @04:01PM (#44240)

    I'm a bit surprised to hear about them censoring "mature content" since I was just reading the HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH page [tvtropes.org] last week.

    Which also raises the question whether such a thing can be called "mature"...it sounds unspeakably gruesome but juvenile vs. "mature"...

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"