SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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]