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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 fadrian on Friday May 16 2014, @02:48PM
Uhh..isn't that illegal?
Well, technically, yes. However, if no one cares enough (or has enough resources) to go up against a website whose content is probably not all that useful in a quixotic effort to gain some sort of satisfaction, the point, according to the law, is moot. If no one with standing cares and brings suit, then, to the court, no one cares - no harm, no foul. Thus it has been; so shall it be. Yay, American law!
That is all.