How to Stop Commerial Use of Copyleft Materials?

An anonymous reader writes "The Guild Wiki, an extremely popular fan-made wiki for documenting the Masssively Multiplayer game Guild Wars, was originally supported by donations, then later advertisements — supposedly just enough to break even. Just the past week, the owner of the domain name surprised this wiki community by revealing that he had sold the domain name, the database, and his services to Wikia, a commercial entity that intends to profit from Guild Wiki's content. The catch? Much of Guild Wiki's content falls under Creative Commons by-nc-sa license, which denies the commercial use of licensed material. Arena.net created their own community run wiki to serve as the in-game help system, because they didn't think they could use the material on Guild Wiki commercially. If Wikia continues to serve ads over Guild Wiki's content, how can the thousands of contributors to the site stop them without going to the expense/trouble of hiring attorneys (or the crude path of mass vandalism)? If it turns out the site owner has been making a profit all along from ads, what's the remedy?"

The first step:

I guess would be to come to terms what exactly "commerial" is... :P

Re:The first step:

Forget that... did anyone notice that Wikia can smash this down in court on grounds that they were defrauded by the seller? After all, he must have lied to them about the license on the material in the product sold to them.

Of course seller here can hammer Wikia with a "you bought a bill of goods and didn't do your *due diligence* on the subject, and are thus to blame for buying what you can't sell".

Irony at its best, but then again, this is slashdot, I wonder how many of you can actually negociate contracts :)

DMCA

Send a DMCA take down notice to the hosting provider since the contents of the website infringe on your copyright? :) You shouldn't even need a lawyer for that, as there are plenty of RIAA and MPAA examples floating around...

Re:MOD PARENT UP

Well, while /.ers are quite aware of DMCA takedown notices, most find their deployment a distasteful tactic at best. I don't think it is an issue of awareness so much as an issue of commitment to principles. While the tactic is normally employed by scary and disreputable corporate drones, the landscape becomes more complicated when it is employed by the so-called "little guys". Takedown notices are just a tool in an arsenal: Is it the tool itself that is the problem, or just the people who usually employ it?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

There are many insidious things about modern copyright legislation in various jurisdictions, but I don't think immediate take-down notices are among them. Such notices are a natural consequence of the need to protect copyright in a world of effectively instant, effectively free transmission of copies with widespread abuse. The notices are just a legal tool, and like all tools, the mechanism itself is neutral and it's how it's used that matters.

(Please don't challenge that "need" now: it's how the law works today, and I don't think this is an appropriate article for the wider discussion.)

Re:MOD PARENT UP

Takedown notices are just a tool in an arsenal: Is it the tool itself that is the problem, or just the people who usually employ it?

There are very few tools in this world that are a problem if they are used by an informed conscientious individual, conversely there are very few tools that are safe when in the hands of a desperate megalomaniac.

Re:DMCA

It's a little more complicated than that. Whichever side wins can at least ask the court to award reasonable fees and costs. But it's up to the court.

However, there's a big caveat. You cannot bring a regular copyright infringement suit in the US at all unless you've registered the work with the copyright office. It's a prerequisite to the suit, and it's common to just throw out cases where the plaintiff hasn't done that, with the understanding that he'll have to go back and do it before coming back to court.

However, the registration is also important in that if the work was unregistered at the time of the infringement, then statutory damages and costs and fees may not be awarded in the case (unless the work was published and unregistered at the time of the infringement, but registered within three months of its first publication, which is the one case where you get a little extra time).

Since the nature of a public wiki would make it annoying to register, at best, it's probably safe to expect that these remedies will never, in practice be available to the wiki group as a plaintiff, and that furthermore even after-the-fact registration just to get an injunction or actual damages and profits will be pretty difficult to manage. This is a known issue with these sorts of things (e.g. GPLed code where the copyrights aren't assigned to the FSF), but them's breaks.

Anyway, this being the case, getting a lawyer willing to take the case on contingency is incredibly unlikely.

Re:DMCA

You do not need to register your work with the Copyright Office.

However, you cannot bring a suit for infringement unless you have registered your work prior to the filing of the suit. If you try to sue and have not already registered, the suit will be dismissed right off of the bat. This is a necessary prerequisite to any copyright infringement action.

Also, if the registration comes after the infringement, then you cannot get statutory damages. This means your damages are limited to the amount you were actually damaged (as opposed to being able to claim tens of thousands of dollars or more per work without proof of how much you were actually damaged) and also the profits made by the infringer attributable to the infringement. Nor can you get reasonable attorney's fees and costs.

There is one exception to that, in that if the infringement takes place after the first publication of the work, but before the registration, and the registration takes place within three months of the first publication of the work, then you can still claim any remedies.

Personally, I would advise people to register immediately, provided that they care about the copyright to a work. If you really don't care whether or not people do something which would constitute infringement, or at least don't care enough to bother registering (there is a simple form, a deposit requirement, and a modest fee), then don't bother. But realize that it will have significant repercussions.

The other thing you should always do is to place a proper copyright notice on works, again, if you care. It's helpful in preventing defendants from having a stronger case.

Wrong, it's NOT YOUR CONTENT.

Okay, now that everyone's in a tizzy, let's bring some reason back to the discussion.

First of all, almost every game out there, including Guild Wars, states in its terms of service that you can use their game content for non-commercial purposes. However, the content remains the property of the game company. That means that if, for example, you post an article in a wiki that contains verbatim descriptions of things found in-game or in documentation otherwise produced by the game company, which most articles are, you have absolutely no right whatsoever to make a DMCA claim because the content is not yours to begin with. If, and that's a huge if, anyone has a right to serve a takedown notice, it would be NCsoft, the owner of the IP for Guild Wars.

Second of all, I too own a popular gaming wiki for City of Heroes [paragonwiki.com], and I too am in the process of moving said wiki over to Wikia. There are many reasons, but among the top ones is the fact that the wiki is become too popular and is overloading my server. Response times are going down, pages aren't loading, and I'm already paying a decent sum of money every month out of my own pocket for a site that has clearly exceeded the capacity of a hobbyist site. At this point, I have one of three options:

• Put ads on the wiki myself.
• Transfer the site to someone else who will run ads.
• Shut the site down.

Regarding option 1, I am not a salesman, nor do I ever want to be. Plus, I just want to concentrate on making the wiki a quality resource for the game's players, not making templates for ads and dealing with money transfers and all. Plus, as you can tell from the submitter's blurb, I don't want to have to deal with people accusing me of doing it for profit. Regarding option 3, I guess some might argue that it would be better to have the information lost forever or dispersed to the winds of the Internet so that it's a lot harder to find, but I don't think that making information less available is in the spirit of what the CC license is about, or the GFDL that the Paragon Wiki uses.

Third of all, all wikis are commercial at some point in the chain. For example, the hosting provider I'm currently using to host the Paragon Wiki isn't free. Could it be argued that because someone (i.e. my hosting provider) is making money off the wiki, it is therefore a commercial endeavor and must be removed? No, that's stupid. If you must, think of this change as the Paragon Wiki, and GuildWiki for that matter, simply changing hosting providers. Instead of me paying a hosting provider money, though, they are getting it through Google ads. I know some folks are going to be saying, "But he got paid and is getting company stock!" And I got paid, too. However, I think you're grossly overestimating the amount. In my talks with Wikia, they told me that they were going to reimburse me retroactively for my hosting costs for the wiki, to give me the money back that I sunk into it for the past couple of years. I did the math. Their number is actually slightly lower than the actual cost, but it's pretty close. I don't know the details (and don't care to) of how much Gravewit got for moving his sites over, but I strongly suspect that he's been paying more in hosting costs than I have, and that it was a similar arrangement, with the money plus the stock value being around the same as his retroactive hosting costs.

Fourth of all, the submitter's summary really portrays Wikia in a needlessly negative light. Can we please acknowledge that they are providing a valuable service here? They could pick and choose only sites that will make them millions in ad revenue to host, but that's not what they're doing. Anyone who wants to can start a new wiki [wikia.com] on any topic that they think would build a community, whether that's a community of a billion people or a community of a hundred. They provide gr

Re:Wrong, it's NOT YOUR CONTENT.

That means that if, for example, you post an article in a wiki that contains verbatim descriptions of things found in-game or in documentation otherwise produced by the game company, which most articles are, you have absolutely no right whatsoever to make a DMCA claim because the content is not yours to begin with.

This is patently false. In the US context if I write an article in which I critique "verbatim descriptions of things found in-game or in documentation otherwise produced by the game company," my usage is protected under Fair Use principles mandated by the First Amendment. Note that critique is a very broad word in this context and can be as simple as "this in-game element is stupid." No click-thru terms of service can deprive me of those rights. I own the entire article, as a complete work of authorship under the Copyright Act, which provides me all the rights and protection of the DMCA and the plain old claim of copyright infringement.

You're wrong about copyright

Aside from things like quest text and screenshots (and that's debatable) pulled directly from the game, the sort of things put on these wikis would not be derivitave works any more than a book review would be.

I don't disagree with you in priciple, but the fact is that the people who wrote the articles licensed them to the wiki under specific terms, and it has a legal obligation to follow them. They can always start again with their own work.

Re:Copyright is for non-profits too

Does the "left" in "Copyleft" have any meaning other than anti-copyright?

Dunno, but whoever invented the term was being very sinister...

How carefully is the license written?

From what you say the site owner is making money from advertising, not directly from the content (e.g. by selling it). Now I understand that the authors of the content probably wouldn't be happy with the site owner making a profit even indirectly from advertising (which is only possible owing to the presence of their content on the site) but whether they can stop him presumably depends on the exact wording of their CC license. If the license doesn't stop him making this indirect profit then there is nothing they can do. I guess it should just serve as a warning to others to ensure that the license you release something under exactly matches your intent for how you want to allow it to be used.

Re:How carefully is the license written?

whether they can stop him presumably depends on the exact wording of their CC license

Why speculate about the possible wording? The relevant wording from the license described is:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in con-nection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

It seems to me that Wikia's use is almost certainly primarily intended for such a purpose.

Re:How carefully is the license written?

Here's the rub, much of the original content was issues under CC NC-SA [creativecommons.org] but the site is now licensed GFDL 1.2 [gnu.org], which specifically allows commercial usage, but the content is specifically disallowing commercial usage. Changing the license was really bad form, but assuming that any new content added by a contributer under the GFDL would change their previous CC NC-SA licensed property was naive and using the content commercially probably illegal.
  The definiton of commercial is pretty vague at times, probably to keep lawyers in bussiness, but now site seems to be driven primarily by a profit motive, unlike the orgininal where the revenues were intended to offset expenses, so the first site was in a gray area, but the second is probably over the line. The poster should talk to a lawyer, maybe the EFF [eff.org] or legal aid would be interested.

Re:How carefully is the license written?

Well, the write up says that wikia is a commercial entity. According to the generally accepted thought about the NC option (from what I gather) a for profit corporation cannot avail themselves of any NC based licenses whatsoever.

By definition, it is said, everything they do is primarily for profit.

Personally, I don't like seeing non-Free licenses called copyleft, but that is a different argument. "Copyleft - all rights reversed" just doesn't work well in that case.

all the best,

drew

http://openphoto.net/gallery/index.html?user_id=178 [openphoto.net]
Underwater Joy

Re:How carefully is the license written?

How carefully is the license written?

It was written using a remote controlled non explosive pencil on an environment safe piece of paper in an bunker on a remote location. The writing speed was one letter per hour and the operator was located in an other timezone.

So I think it's safe to say it was very carefully written.

Vandalism won't work.

the crude path of mass vandalism

You can't destroy a wiki with vandalism. A simple script can roll every single page back to a particular date, and then it can all be locked. You can ruin the community aspect of it, and presumably take away a great deal of the value assuming Wikia believe they're buying the community rather than merely the content, but if Wikia think the content is finished and in a state where they can sell it (through advertising) then there's little that can be done.

Except...

The authors of the wiki pages are the owners of their content, and as such they're free to put their content onto the other wiki. They're free to put it onto 1000 other wikis. With some SEO expertise it should be possible to make Wikia's purchase completely worthless because noone would ever see it, so noone would ever view any of their adverts.

The terms of the license...

...are specific in usage restrictions. I can see this going to court. In which case, I root for the users. The commercial entity isn't /asking/ permission to use the material, it's stating its /intention/ to violate the license under which the material is posted. Screw the users. Not the way to run a business if you want to stay in business.

Re:The terms of the license...

Very bright considering the principle of the matter: you have these people licensing their work under their terms, then you have this company intent on taking that work and pretty much living off the backs of the people who created it after being told pretty damn succinctly that they /cannot/ do what they intend to do, according to the terms of the license with which the material was distributed in the first place. That'd be like me buying a copy of [insert commercial software/music/DVD title here], duplicating it and selling copies on, en masse, to whoever wants it. Microsoft et. al., would have my balls in a sling in two seconds. Why shouldn't the little guy be able to do a switch on the BEC (Big Evil Corporations)?

The user just have to walk away

Why make it difficult? Just let the commercial community wither and die.

Wikia is run by the wikipedia founder

As much as I'm appalled by the legal incongruencies involved, the deal seems to be rather fair towards the contributors (except that they didn't get $$$ - but did they ever expect money in return for CC-NC content?)

I mean, Jimbo Wales is no idiot about Wikis (and seemed very down to earth guy when I met him). As much as this might be legal wrangling in the hands of the original owner, if I were a contributor I wouldn't be calling my lawyers. The ideal solution would be for the Wikia folks to ask for CC-SA (striking the NC) relicensing from all authors - in a classic King Solomon solution, by putting up a static data dump on torrents & offering to take down content of any contributor who objects from the wiki version.

But not the lawyers ... don't turn this place into a land of "lawyers and order".

Easy

Fork 'Em

Copyleft does not try to prevent commercial use

Just to clarify, copyleft ("SA" in CC terms) does not prevent commercial use at all. The problem here is the noncommercial ("NC") clause, which is something completely different.

Why the change of heart

My question is why the sudden change of heart about commercial use? It is stated that the site has had advertising, so why is it okay for the old site owner to put advertising on the site, but not okay for the new owner to put advertising on the site? The older owner may not have made a lot of money of the site (at least he claims he didn't, I doubt anyone but him really knows) but his intention was obviously commercial, as shown by his selling of the site and cashing in. It seems to me the license of being broken before and no one cared about it, so why is okay for the former owner to break the license bu not okay for the new owner?

Re:Why the change of heart

Even if the old author was violating the NC clause, I'd say that selling the site is a commercial use.

What different about this when it comes to.....

... the software industry?

1) come out with useful but buggy software
2) have buying customers users report bugs and make suggestions for improvements
3) sell upgrades back to them.
4) don't pay them for any of their work
5) Copyright and patent teh improvements you got from the users.
6) do like autodesk, don't allow the customer/users to sell their used software.

Here you have game players doing a bunch of documentation for free on a game that is commercial.

The web site made money off of the unpaid efforts of the documentators efforts in on site advertising and the sale of the site.

step Seven:

lock down the documentation and site and require all contributors to pay a monthly fee for access.

How can the contributors respond?

Copy the site to another location and sue the pants off of any attempt to stop this.

Using the DMCA to shut the site down is contradictory to the original intent of the contributors.

Consumer deception was applied by the site owner.

This seems straightforward...

Obviously, IANAL.

From the FP, it sounds like you have two separate situations here.

First, you had free hosting that came with a domain name (and probably some form of basic administration in the setting up of the Wiki and keeping it running smoothly - Though your community may have separated those four "services").

Second, you have user-provided CC-nc content that happens to live on the above-provided set of services.

Your community (individually, keep in mind) "owns" the latter. You have no rights at all to the former (though your could argue the domain name itself as a trademark, I highly doubt you registered it as such, and the courts always favor the party who will actually use it for, y'know, "trade" over any nonprofit use.

So as much as you may object to this change, no one has actually violated your copyrights, yet. Your domain owner and admin sold their services, not your content ("the database" can have multiple meanings; you should generally presume a legal one until proven otherwise). Thus, you have two choices, as I see it:

1) Do nothing, and accept banner ads as the price of your hosting.

2) Inform the new owner of your intent, as a group, to disallow them the use of your content. Begin removing it from the current servers and move it elsewhere (a variation of what you called "mass vandalism").

In the case of #2, if Wikia starts doing massive rollbacks to "preserve" content you have every right to remove, then you can cry copyright infringement, and may want to hire a lawyer (this seems like a perfect class-action situation, if you can get anyone to take the case for such small stakes, since you don't actually want any cash for it, you just want an injunction against use of it by Wikia). They may, however, play it perfectly fair. They might expect to lose 10-25% of the community, and treat the rest well enough to stay and even recover over a few months.

But mostly, you should probably wait for an actual infringement before crying wolf.

The language is not ambiguous

This seems pretty clear to me:

Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

Unless the site owner had an agreement outside the content license (ToS?) then he had no right to license the content to anyone else or sell it to anyone else. IMHO the only relevant question is whether the purpose of the site is commercial.

If it's hosted in the US a DMCA take-down notice should be adequate to get your material off the site. If it's in Germany, that's an interesting question. I'm not sure how that works.

CreativeCommons is a license to use material, not a waiver of copyright or bill of sale. You can either choose to use the material according to the license terms or choose not to use the material, much like the GPL. Now whether any of this has teeth under German law...beats me.

This raises a question

Other replies have spoken about scraping this particular site's CC content and copying it to another wiki. That's fine if you can get to the content, but what if a hypothetical site abruptly converted to a fee-for-access format? Obviously you'd then need to either pay to recover what should be freely available, or scrape the data from someplace else, such as Google's cache or the Internet Archive. That assumes, however, that the content is available from those places, which could be prevented by adding suitable meta tags (nosearch, noarchive) during a period prior to the conversion.

So here are my questions: Are there any search engines or archive sites that will ignore meta tags that contradict a CC license and cache the content anyway? Is there any way to somehow cause Google or the Internet Archive to cache such content despite its meta data?

Usenet archives

It's funny. A while ago, probably not long after Google bought out Deja News, there was some bad feeling from Usenet contributors who felt that their content had been sold, and others were basically profiteering on the back of their work. A few custom services were also popping up, which reproduced the content on certain Usenet groups but splatted those irritating ad-links all over key words in the content. When I suggested that this was inappropriate in a discussion here, a whole load of people basically told me to STFU because once I'd posted the content on Usenet I should have known that was going to happen.

I pointed out that at the time Deja started keeping its archive, I (and many others) would not necessarily have been aware of it, and might reasonably have expected articles to expire after a few days (as they did at the time on pretty much all ISPs' Usenet servers). I was directed to the relevant RFCs and told that they said content could be kept effectively indefinitely, and that this was more important than the industry standard practice at the time that users would actually have experienced.

I pointed out that the only licence anyone had to copy my and others' copyrighted content from Usenet was the implicit one granted by posting in the first place, and that it was questionable whether this covered commercial use or for that matter the RFC-sanctioned archival if most people using the system didn't know that could happen. This, too was our problem, I was told.

I pointed out that splatting the hyperlink ads all over the content degraded the content and certainly would not be expected on a normal Usenet system. This, apparently, was just fair use, and the fact that US-style fair use doesn't even apply in my country (where some of the material was being posted) didn't matter.

The critics' conclusion: Too bad, get over it, you have no legal rights.

My conclusion #1: Don't ask Slashdot about legal rights, ask a lawyer.

My conclusion #2: Expect to get screwed by unethical/illegal business practices if you put your content on-line anywhere but you don't have big enough legal guns to defend it afterwards. But you should take what steps you can to minimise the effort required to defend your rights: including the non-commercial clause that applies here, for example.

My prediction: In the current, Web 2.0-ish world full of community-made content, there's going to be a lot of bad feeling sooner or later, as the numerous businesses who basically just host discussion facilities but then claim rights over the content start profiteering, potentially at the expense of those who wrote the material in the first place. The so-called "you write all the content, they keep all the money" model is a great deal for businesses but a lousy deal for the contributors, who tend to suffer from some idealistic illusion that their content is safe and the service they are supporting will continue to operate for their benefit even if it's not making enough money. A lot of people's feelings are going to get hurt as this happens more often, and this case is just the start.

My answer: If you want to share content on-line, always host it on your own terms. Don't use a commercial service for your blog, set up your own. It's almost as cheap and easy these days, and then there's no ambiguity about the ongoing hosting, the rights to the material, or the privacy implications of someone else holding potentially substantial amounts of personal data. If you want to set up a community site with friends, get a friendly geek to help you do so with your own web host, for the same reasons.

Not A Clear Violation. Why Sweat It?

I actually doubt that they have a legal case. Moreover, the slashdot/opensource/etc community should be strongly opposed to any court ruling which would ban this sort of behavior.

The relevant part of the license is the following:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

For starters I don't like this wording at all. It grants a right that is conditioned on the intent of the entity exercising the license which makes it horribly vague. Now obviously this passage prohibits the sale of the material (e.g. give me five bucks I'll give you this content) but what this means for other uses (like advertising) is extremely problematic. Moreover, it would be very very harmful if the courts read this license to prohibit the use of the material in a way that lets one gain commercial benefits because of the mere interest and popularity of the work.

Suppose for instance a bunch of documentation is released under this licensce for some open source software. If any use requiring the license that is motivated by commercial advantage even if the compensation is only indirect is bared then IBM would be barred from paying some of it's employees from adding to the documentation on the wiki. Sure the result of their action is just to help the project like anyone else but they motivation is to gain commercial advantage by improving documentation for their customers (along with everyone else) and they had to use the license to make the modifications (derivative work). Nor could any such project be hosted on google code or take advantage of google's summer of code. After all google's motivation in both projects is to elevate their corporate image and thus give them a competitive advantage. Hell, even contributing to the project to impress your boss or to learn how to write/code so you can get a better job would be banned.

Of course you could try to weasel about the meaning of the word "primarily intended" to avoid these consequences but then companies like this could do the same. If you get to weasel on this word they can simply weasel and say something like "yes we want to make profit but our primary intention is just to provide a commercially stable distribution mechanism for this product and that requires being a profitable company." There just isn't any good way to distinguish using the copyright to draw page views which draw ad revenue from using the copyright to look good so you draw customers without explicit language in the license to make this distinction. You can't make the license mean "whatever I find objectionable is off limits."

Ultimately I think we are all better off if the non-commercial aspect of this license is interpreted narrowly, i.e, it stops you from charging admission to a play you are putting on with this material, putting it on a CD and charging for that CD or other direct exchanges of value for the work. As for what you do in situations like this one, you don't whine about it.

I understand the motivation for not wanting people to charge for your work or to otherwise turn your work into a commercial product but that's not what's happening here. Intuitively (though not legally) this company isn't behaving much differently than google (or slashdot in hosting our comments). They are aren't suggesting that the content isn't free or making sure you have to pay them for the work. They are just making a profit in return for hosting the material. If you don't like the ads the obvious solution is to se

Dealing with the problem

Understand up front that you can't have it both ways. You may either refuse the use of your work or not. They may show ads or collect the works into a compendium or do whatever they want. This is not within your control. The only thing within your control is whether or not they use the particular works you provided.

To that extent, you may remove -YOUR- works if you still have the power or demand their removal via a DMCA takedown if you've been shut out. You may also sue, however without a registered copyright and with only miniscule commercial value the damages you might recover will not be sufficient to pay your legal bill.

There are two ways this could go...

Creative Commons licenses are non-exclusive. So, does he have anything in the posting agreement that says that he has the right to change licenses?

IANAL

But a few things spring to mind here.

1) Functionally, this is a hosting move - the Gamewikis site is now hosted by Wikia. There are some ads that run, but no hosting bills. So the question becomes whether CC-BY-SA permits or prohibits using commercial, ad-supported hosting for CC-BY-SA content. (A secondary question is whether anyone who continued posting on Gamewikis after it was ad supported tacitly agreed that their content could be hosted by ad-supported hosting.)

2) Continuity of the site matters here. When one hits submit to put content on a wiki, one tacitly gives the hosts of that wiki permission to, well, host, distribute, and use the content. If there is a genuine continuity between Gamewikis and Gamewikies on Wikia, that tacit permission would presumably endure.

3) You can't easily sue without damages. That is, you'd have to be able to show non-trivially that the hosting by Wikia actually harmed you. This could be difficult.

4) The moral point here seems obscure at best. Nothing in the post or links gives any evidence that Gamewikis has made a profit in the past. Yes, they probably shouldn't have taken money for the site, but the fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, this is a change in hosting that brings Gamewikis onto a site that is run by good people with a sincere commitment to free content. I question what useful point is made by taking an angry, community-destroying stand here.

EFF ?

Isn't it why you make donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation ?

What if damages == 0?

Let's say someone sues. They win. They don't charge any money in first place. Wouldn't the damages be zero?

If that's the case (and I have no idea if that is indeed the case), enforcement wouldn't have any teeth.

Arena.net thought its impossible to buy the wiki

This is pretty strange. Let me quote the official Guild wars wiki http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Wiki:About [guildwars.com]

Has ArenaNet considered just purchasing GuildWiki from Phil (Gravewit)?
Technically, it's not possible for Phil to sell the content of GuildWiki. He doesn't own it. The site contains articles written by hundreds of different people, and each author still holds the copyrights for the articles that he or she wrote. The Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license used by GuildWiki provides certain rights, but selling the content for profit is not a right that's provided by that license. So Phil doesn't own the content and he's not allowed to make a profit by selling it.
Individual contributors still hold the copyrights to their articles and can license them however they wish. Anyone who wrote an article for GuildWiki can choose to also make that article available to another site under another license. That's a choice for contributors to make, but it's not a choice that Phil is legally allowed to make on their behalf.
Has ArenaNet considered leaving the content on Phil's site and just paying his hosting bills?
The content on Phil's site uses the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which probably prevents us from using it as a primary source of documentation for our games or building wiki integration into our games, regardless of whether Phil runs the site or we do.
Does Phil earn a living from selling ads on his site, and will ArenaNet be taking that away from him by hosting a wiki with no ads?
When we talked with Phil, he told us that the ads on his site only help to defray some of the costs of running the site, and that he still has to spend a lot of his own money to pay for server hosting and bandwidth. Phil is unfortunately in a position where hosting the Guild Wars wiki can't ever become a profitable business for him, because he is hosting it under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that disallows him from making a profit off the site's content. Phil has started building new wiki sites for other games using the Free Document License instead of the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, so it is possible that his new wikis may become profitable businesses for him. We are very grateful to Phil for everything he has done for Guild Wars; we want to keep his best interests in mind; and we sincerely wish him success in his endeavors.
Can ArenaNet 'fork' the GuildWiki site and use it as a basis for ArenaNet's hosted site?
We don't have the right to do that, and Phil doesn't have the right to do that. Only individual contributors have the right to upload the articles they've written to a different site under a different license.

You can't

If Wikia continues to serve ads over Guild Wiki's content, how can the thousands of contributors to the site stop them without going to the expense/trouble of hiring attorneys?

You can't. Either the CC "no commercial" license has a punative clause, in which case you should be able to get an attorney on retainer, or it doesn't, and it's a license with no teeth.

Either suck it up, sue, or fork.

Let it go! Would ya?

Jeeze. Such things are just as goofy as the restrictions coming out of "regular" copyright. If you don't like what they're doing start an alternative and forget about them. Otherwise take your money, and with all due respect, STFU. If they have no claim to exclusivity(which can only affect the signatories anyway), then ignore it, and use the material as you see fit. What difference does it make if somebody makes money with it if nobody can stop you from using or modifying or distributing it the way you like? That's what makes public domain the most desirable option. No lawyers, no judges, no 50 kilobyte licenses, just full access for everybody. If a commercial work contains public domain info, then that info is still in the public domain, and nobody can claim a monopoly over it. And I will go so far as to say that nobody can claim a monopoly on how the material is accessed, manipulated, laid out, etc. Public domain shall remain totally and completely public, to the advantage of no-one. Otherwise what's stated in the contract and ONLY in the SIGNED contract between the buyer and the seller should be the rule of the day. Nobody else has any obligations. This mad craving for control is spread around pretty evenly, even amongst those who consider themselves more "liberated". Makes you all sound like a bunch of hypocrites. Or even snobs. Phooey!

Hello Sony.

You're never going to stop it. It's unstoppable. It's our fault for not adjusting our business model to meet with modern reality. why does this sound familiar?

Fault with the owner

Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't the fault lie with the previous owner? He's the first link in the profit chain, he sold the site to make money, therefore he broke the license it was released under.

Your Own Catch 22

Let me get this straight: you want to enforce the legal requirements of the content license, but you don't want to use the legal system to do it. Sorry. If you want to enforce an agreement, you have to stand in front of a judge and show that the agreement is applicable and enforceable. (Retaining a lawyer is not mandatory, but is highly advisable.) There's no magical way to guarantee that everybody respects your rights as you see them.

This is a farse.

I remember quite clearly that once upon a time non-commercial use meant that you didn't charge anyone for the material. It has always been the norm for the person redistributing the materials to serve ads on the sites to cover their expenses and if they can make a buck or two then more power to them. It isn't a sin to make a profit, as long as they provide a clean, easy to use, and accessible repository of content at no charge then they are empowering the internet by hosting more content for the masses. If they use ads in a way that is a pain the tail, the license allows you to build a new site to supplant them.

All the sudden this mentality has changed. I think it mostly started with copyright owners going after Youtube for profiting off their content. You can't control the media industry's hysteria on this but surely the community can recognize that the current model of the internet can't work without distinguishing how the content itself is being served from how the ads on the page are being served.

I realize the GPL doesn't prohibit a charge but just the same if the local bookstore had a big rack and banners saying they were giving out free Ubuntu DVD's I certainly wouldn't call that commercial use. They are giving the DVD's out for free and helping to spread awareness; if someone happens to buy a book while picking up a DVD then I'm happy for the bookstore.

Someone's making MONEY?!

Oh please God, NOOOOOOO! Anything but that! We can't have people making money! Someone, please, stop them!

Have they heard about ...?

If Wikia continues to serve ads over Guild Wiki's content, how can the thousands of contributors to the site stop them without going to the expense/trouble of hiring attorneys

Have they heard about CLASS ACTION?

Sounds impossible to do legally

I don't see how selling it to Wikia would be possible, since the contributors are submitted at the time of an incompatible license (unless Wikia decides to "Share Alike" for this wiki). It doesn't even help if GuildWiki changes the license now. It would still be a breach of the terms approved by the contributors up until the sale, in case the license will change.

This was why ArenaNet handled things differently. They did it this way: Started wiki.guildwars.com as the official Guild Wars wiki, that is instead of that CC-license using the GFDL license unless in exceptions (screenshots and art assets contributed for the wiki by the developers). Then contributors of GuildWiki could come over there and submit content that they themselves had approved to dual license for the GFDL. So a subset was moved over there, but they had to leave all content at GuildWiki that didn't have explicit permission for re-use.

Lawyers

No agreement or contract is worth anything unless it can be legally defended. Any license can be violated with impunity if the licensor fails to enforce the license.

Doesn't he own it?

If it was his site, and therefore he was the one who holds ownership of the IP, just because he allows others to use it under said CC license doeesn't mean he can't himself use it for his own, for-profit ends. His ownership = his choice of use. There are certainly arguments about someone else creating the content for his wiki. But if we assume that he made a clause in the terms of use, then he can use the content others posted to his own site to his own ends.

Is not a man entitled to the sweat of his brow? No, says the man on Slashdot.

Not Free

> Much of Guild Wiki's content falls under Creative Commons by-nc-sa license, which denies
> the commercial use of licensed material.

I suppose that might qualify as "copyleft" under some definitions but it isn't Libre.

Big difference between GPL and CC-BY-NC-*

The new owner could even charge for access to the new site with the same content, because use of the wiki is not copylefted, only the content

From the license: "You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation" (my emphasis). As I read this restriction, it includes "commercial advantage or private monetary compensation" for use of a web site containing a covered work. It's like those eBay auctions for a pencil, where the winning bidder receives a copy of a work at no extra charge: a loophole that any judge will see through.

Essentially its like a "for pay" hosting of gpl'ed software, the pay would be for access to the site, not the content.

The GNU General Public License explicitly permits commercial reproduction and distribution [gnu.org] of covered works. Creative Commons non-commercial licenses do not.

Re:furthermore

The point everyone seems to miss is that the works are *not* licensed to GuildWiki under the Creative Commons license. GuildWiki licenses the material to the general public under the CC license.

Under the TOS, contributers license GuildWiki the right to produce derivative works without -- as far as I can tell any restrictions except that GuildWiki's subsequent licensing of the material must under CC non-commercial.

Someone purchasing GuildWiki's rights would not be a sub-licensor. They would step into GuildWiki's shoes and as far as I can tell would even be able to sell CC-NC licenses if they wanted to.

Re:What's the big deal.

The other people put their material there. It was their choice. They could have started their own server, but chose not too. If they don't like it they can take down their material.

Re:non-commercial use

You're actually wrong. The license specifies extremely clearly that the materials cannot be copied for purposes "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation." This would prohibit the initial installation of the data on a commercial server. Get a volunteer to install it and you're prevented from touching it again. Backups? Nope. Extra installations? Nope. Even if you outsourced the copying to an outside institution you could end up screwed if your server copies materials in the process of serving them, such as through database caches.

So sorry that you don't like it, but the CC-NC license is hostile to commercial use. I don't have any problem with this.

The reasonable defense for Wikia here is to claim that their use of the materials is not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage. This is not an unreasonable claim considering that the company is not asserting ownership over the materials and is providing access to them free-of-charge. The CC license is ambiguous about what constitutes "primarily" commercial use however. The word "intended" is even more tricky.