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.
(Score: 1) by joshuajon on Friday May 16 2014, @02:02PM
Wait, so the license change was just to add the non-commercial aspects? Seems like a legit move in my opinion. I'd be curious to know whether running ads on a site violates this clause though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16 2014, @02:42PM
Since the content was provided to them under a licence which (a) didn't have the no-commercial clause, and (b) didn't allow to add it, no, it's not legit.