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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: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday May 29 2014, @06:28PM
You would think so, especially the retro-active part.
I'm going to take a SECOND read of NCommander's Manifesto [soylentnews.org] and, more importantly, the Bylaws [soylentnews.org] to see if anything is in there to put a stop to this kind of license presto-chango nonsense in SoylentNews's future.
Ideally this would be in the Articles of Incorporation, which in most states can't be changed without re-filing, rather than the Bylaws which can be changed internally. The rules under which we submit content, and the licenses used, should be as immutable as possible.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by NCommander on Thursday May 29 2014, @08:55PM
It's not in the manifesto, but its going to get added; I didn't think I'd have to put something in saying we wouldn't do something illegal, but given TVTropes and now this, I think I rather have it in black and white. We've discussed the possibility of relicensing site content to a CC license, but the plan was it would never be retroactive and we'd put a break in the database to mark what is/isn't licensed what (something of a larger change). We might provide the user functionality to re-license old stuff under the new license, but it would not be automatic.
The *sole* exception I could see to this is license upgrades (i.e. CC-BY-SA 3.0 -> 4.0 which helped w/ international usage of content)), but with the exception of the (L)GPL, I'm unaware of any license that says that this is an automatic right. Once I have had a chance to sleep on it, I'll get some wording worked up, and likely an article about it (we've got some slated to go out with the site upgrade planned for this weekend, so I might just attach it there).
Not sure how'd we'd put something like that in the Articles of Incorporation, though putting it in the bylaws is an option (we're almost at the point to hire a lawyer, the staff have been going through the draft bylaws, and I've been checking every resource I have available to make sure there isn't anything obvious in what is likely a futile attempt to keep costs down).
Strictly speaking, this shit is illegal (retroactive relicensing) unless something else allows them to, but the copyright holder has to drag the infringer to court to make it count. Will be interesting to see if some users of wikia decide to make an issue about it; this could easily go to SCOTUS (I'd bet money there is a lawyer somewhere that would defend something like this pro-bono).
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 30 2014, @07:50PM
OpenStreetMap changed their license in 2012.
If the original contributors could not be contacted or did not agree then eventually their data was removed from the new database before the license change took effect. The implementation plan shows the care they took in the transition and I think it worked out well. There were noticeable holes in the data but at least in my case, I was motivated to go fill in where needed.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_Licen se/Implementation_Plan [openstreetmap.org]
The overall view: http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/About_Th e_License_Change [osmfoundation.org]