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http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/16/wikimedia-internet-...
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…
> 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. :(
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.
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 tha…
In most professions where the work product is in a natural language, reusing significant portions of others' work is called "plagiarism", and is considered a serious ethical violation. Reusing small portions for the sake of making a point, on the other hand, is covered by fair use rules.
So yeah, licensing concerns might be a mostly irrelevant detail. The big questions about when you can and cannot reuse others' work product are already covered by a rigorously socially-enforced ethical standard, and the law. Both of those are more powerful than mere contracts in their own way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
In programming, when you reuse others' work product it's considered good engineering practice. We call it "not reinventing the wheel." In most professions where the work product is in a natural language, reusing significant portions of others' work is called "plagiarism", and is considered a serious ethical violation. Reusing small portions for the sake of making a point, on the other hand, is covered by fair use rul…
I kind of hope this situation doesn't arise with TV Tropes, but you never know...
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…
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 le…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
In programming, when you reuse others' work product it's considered good engineering practice. We call it "not reinventing the wheel." In most professions where the work product is in a natural language, reusing significant portions of others' work is called "plagiarism", and is considered a serious ethical violation. Reusing small portions for the sake of making a point, on the other hand, is covered by fair use rul…
It's plagiarism to copy someone's code without giving attribution. It's not plagiarism to copy someone's code if you give attribution.
It's plagiarism to copy someone's natural language text without giving attribution. It's not plagiarism to copy someone's natural language text if you give attribution.
In either case, copying someone else's code or natural text is potentially copyright infringement, but that's a different matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the list can be huge. It's not unlikely that the list of contributors is longer than the article.
Storage is cheap, and you can stash the list away somewhere that doesn't interfere with the main content, so what does that matter?
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.
Can you expand? What happened with the censorship? As a casual, occasional browser I don't know where to start looking.
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.
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.
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 tha…