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from the it's-more-fun-when-you-write-the-rules dept.
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 popular wikis? Do Creative Commons licenses hold any weight for community websites?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Thursday May 29 2014, @06:03PM
How would it be useful? So you see the same story at another site after you've already read it. If you can't tell by the first couple of sentences of the summary then you didn't spend much time on it the first time you saw it.
I see the same stories on a bunch of different sites. Since I've been submitting here it's been a real eye-opener about how much of an echo-chamber these nerd-news sites are.
Trying to define soylent in terms of slashdot just makes soylent irrelevant.
(Score: 2) by kebes on Sunday June 01 2014, @02:18PM
I don't think this is peculiar to nerd-news sites; it's a very general phenomenon, applicable to news sites generally, or even more generally to all human communication.
If you think about the vast number of humans on Earth, and the correspondingly vast number of things that happen in any given day, the fact that different news sources end up discussing the same event shows that they are being highly selective in what they report. Only a tiny subset of 'potentially shareable information' gets promulgated: either being "reported on" by news agencies, or "going viral", or "becoming gossip", or whatever.
This is mostly because of human nature: we have limited mental capacities (and so can't handle a barrage of information), our minds prefer simple narratives (so we like to dwell on a story/event until we think we understand it), there are bandwagon effects (others are talking about it so it must be important, I want to be part of the group and 'in the know'), etc. Then there is a tension between our innate desire for familiarity and novelty, which sets the timescale over which events go from being widely spread/discussed, to being forgotten. Mass-media and the Internet then act as multipliers: yielding highly exaggerated versions of inherent human gossiping.
It's perhaps sad how capricious human information-sharing is. The inherent selectivity of how we accumulate, share, and store information means it is never a statistically-valid sampling of reality; which leads to the emergence of well-known errors when people assume that this information is robust.