
Edge of the Creative Commons (2013) - TuringTest
http://blog.brentlaabs.com/2013/12/the-edge-of-creative-commons.html
======
paulgb
Internet Brands tried something similar with WikiTravel (also CC). When they
bought the popular wiki and slapped their ads all over it, some contributors
forked it as WikiVoyage. IB sued. It was eventually settled in favor of
WikiVoyage.

[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/16/wikimedia-
internet-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/16/wikimedia-internet-
brands-wikivoyage-settlement/)

------
blueskin_
TV Tropes is total crap now. I also departed around the time of one of the big
censorship debacles, and honestly, don't miss it.

PS. thanks for indirectly sharing a link to All The Tropes (linked author's
fork of TVTropes) too; might have a poke around there.

~~~
malnourish
Can you expand? What happened with the censorship? As a casual, occasional
browser I don't know where to start looking.

~~~
blueskin_
They've had a couple of rounds of deleting anything that might be considered
sexual, NSFW, or controversial reference or language, as well as renaming
articles. This is to make the site more attractive for advertisers because the
admins want moar moniez.

It's also worse on tvtropes than most wikis because there is a very limited
revision history on most pages (might be the weird software they use rather
than admin-imposed), and anything that falls of the end of it after long
enough is gone forever.

~~~
wwwwwwwwww
I'm still mad about them going and removing all the monster girl quest
articles during that spiel. That was pretty much the end of tvtropes for me.

~~~
hga
Trying to learn about that game so I could understand a good fanfic was what
alerted me to the problem, and not surprisingly the first fork of the site I
looked at, back when it was announced on HN (can't find the link,
unfortunately), the front page (Wikimedia) highlighted that title.

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smackfu
This is 6 months old, so it doesn't seem like it went anywhere. Probably
because the greater internet has no motivation to oppose moving content to a
non-commercial license.

~~~
mikeash
I think it speaks to a different mindset from what we as programmers are used
to.

Licensing is a pretty big deal for us. Virtually every programmer has some
sort of opinion on GPL vs BSD vs public domain vs whatever. Open source
projects can live or die because of their license.

Wikis are basically open source projects with natural language instead of
code. But I get the impression that few wiki contributors care that much about
licenses.

If I had to guess, I'd say that it's because code is more modular and
flexible. If you write a useful open source library, the license you put on it
can have huge implications for what products end up using it. There's no wiki
equivalent to e.g. large quantities of BSD code being used to build a
smartphone that sells hundreds of millions of units.

~~~
eric_cc
I'm a programmer and at the risk of sounding like an idiot - I have no opinion
on licensing and could not tell you a single thing about any one license. Are
there really that many people knowledgable about different licenses?

~~~
acheron
Nah, you're not an idiot. There's a tendency on HN of people saying "all
programmers" to mean "programmers who live in Silicon Valley, use open source
tools to write web apps funded by ad eyeballs, and put all their code on
Github". Witness the countless posts about "why should I interview when I can
point to a Github account", or that article yesterday about "articles every
programmer should read" that had something about SEO in it (and then the
replies from people unable to see why that was silly), etc.

~~~
mikeash
That's kind of funny, since I'm nowhere near Silicon Valley and don't even
identify with that crowd, I rarely do any web work, and write plenty of
proprietary code. (Ironically, web apps are an area where you can generally
get away with not knowing anything about open source licenses, since you're
not redistributing the programs you make.)

I merely observe that programmers generally use third party libraries, and
that doing so requires at least a basic understanding of the license terms.

Maybe there are a lot of people out there writing code who never touch
external code?

~~~
TuringTest
_(Ironically, web apps are an area where you can generally get away with not
knowing anything about open source licenses, since you 're not redistributing
the programs you make.)_

Except if you happen to use something under an Affero GPL license, in which
case you really should know about it.

But yes, those project are rare.

~~~
mikeash
I hadn't heard of that one. Is it actually enforceable? I was under the
impression that the GPL didn't require opening server code, not because it was
missing something, but because server code doesn't get distributed and thus
doesn't fall under copyright limitations in the first place.

~~~
Flimm
You find a library on the Internet somewhere. What entitles you to copy it
onto your machines? Copyright does not allow to do this, so you are reliant on
a license to give you permission to do this. GPL gives you permission to do
this, as long as when you distribute any modifications of it, you also pass
along the source code. AGPL gives you permission to do this, as long as you
give the source code to all of your users should they request it. If you can't
meet the conditions, than you don't get the rights acquired by the license,
and you fall back to default copyright, which says it's illegal to have copied
the library to your own machines in the first place.

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putlake
I'm the founder of a wiki so I know some of these legal issues better than
most (although, of course IANAL). Typically how this is supposed to work is:
Wiki's terms of use say

(1) Users own the copyright to their contributions (authors always do;
TVTropes appropriating this is not right)

(2)Users grant wiki a non-exclusive irrevocable license to do use the content
in any way Wiki likes, including specifically a right to distribute it under
CC.

That's where author of OP felt cheated. He wanted to contribute because he
felt the content will be licensed CC-BY-SA but Wiki changed it. But this is
fine. Author owns the copyright to his personal contributions so he can always
publish it under any license he wants. (like he did in his blog post, where he
declared all his contributions to be available under CC-BY-SA). The only
wrinkle is for someone to be able to find specifically the author's
contributions. If the author built upon someone else's work, the result might
still be fine to use under CC-BY-SA because at the time the original work on
the wiki was under CC-BY-SA. But any edits after the author's contribution are
off limits for CC-BY-SA.

Wiki is legally within its rights to change the licensing of its content.

~~~
lifthrasiir
No. The text below the edit page reads:

> TV Tropes by TV Tropes Foundation, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions
> beyond the scope of this license may be available from
> thestaff@tvtropes.org. Donation of text is irrevocable and appreciated.

While not explicit, this implies that the editor should make it sure that the
contributed text can be legally merged to the existing CC-BY-NC-SA license
(for the obvious reason). This clearly does not include a relicensing grant
and you are not permitted to do so.

Actually, I've had a similar cause in another Korean wiki similar to TV Tropes
(Rigveda Wiki). In this case the wiki temporarily condemned that its mirroring
website does not have a legal right to do the mirroring, and pointed out that
the mirroring website has ads attached. A funny thing is that, the wiki itself
was licensed as CC-BY-NC-SA and also had ads! While it is debatable if website
ads are considered commercial activities or not, the same logic directly
applies to the wiki, but the wiki admin replied that it (thinks that it) has a
relicensing right when I've asked for that. :(

~~~
kevinpet
"Donation of text is irrevocable" seems to be the only thing that implies a
license from contributor to TV Tropes. It's pretty vague and I certainly
wouldn't want to sue claiming a license with that to back it up.

It's also unclear whether that text existed before the switch to CC-SA-NC.
Obviously it was updated, but was just the license changed? This is
significant because contributing under CC-SA to someone using it commercially
is possible. Contributing under CC-SA-NC to someone using it commercially
doesn't make any sense, so they would need to have another license.

~~~
lifthrasiir
Good points. I don't know if the edit page had a mention about irrevocable
relicensing back then though (the Wikipedia description seems to suggest that
it wasn't the case).

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TillE
What about the attribution clause? If I copy an article from a CC-BY-* wiki,
am I expected to cite every contributor? That doesn't seem reasonable. How
does Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA) deal with this?

~~~
mikeash
I'm curious, why would it be unreasonable to cite every contributor to an
article you copy? They are the ones who made it, and it only seems reasonable
to me to give credit where it's due.

~~~
LukeShu
Because the list can be huge. It's not unlikely that the list of contributors
is longer than the article.

~~~
mikeash
Storage is cheap, and you can stash the list away somewhere that doesn't
interfere with the main content, so what does that matter?

~~~
dllthomas
What is the difference between stashing the list away somewhere out of sight
and providing a link to the Wikipedia page whose history contains the same
information? Particularly since storage is _not_ cheap in every medium (e.g.
requiring my one-page flier to attach 3 pages of attributions doesn't make
sense) and if you're resorting to a link regardless...

~~~
dublinben
If you're making a one page flyer with enough copyrighted information from
Wikipedia to require onerous attribution, you're doing it wrong.

~~~
dllthomas
I don't see that this is the case, at all. A single paragraph that has been
edited enough times could be the work of an unbounded number of contributors,
since it is always a derivative work of the earlier versions. If that single
paragraph, modified for format, makes up the bulk of your flier then you
should clearly include attribution somehow.

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fredup
In trying to "fix" this problem have TVT potentially made themselves liable
for all the content posted there? They now assert "ownership" of all the
content. In order to be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency
Act courts have held that they must not be "information content providers"[1],
but TVT asserts full rights over all the content, including relicensing and
use without attribution.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act)

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perlpimp
It seems that contributors care about availability of the content most,
licencing issues less so. There are mirror tropes wikis so I don't see a
problem. Clone that data and run your own version if you like.

[http://tropes.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page](http://tropes.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page)

That move is a bit scummy, but then they are in the business and best business
is one that delivers profit at least cost.

my 2c

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le_meta
I generally don't find TVT interesting, but I'd love to hear more about these
tropes that make these kind of people uncomfortable.

~~~
smackfu
Well, they have anime, so why not hentai? And if they have hentai, why not
extreme hentai like incest? And then you end up with a "Heartwarming" trope
where someone sleeps with their mother.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20110118061340/http://tvtropes.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110118061340/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BoysEmpire)

I think porn examples are banned now.

