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Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

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Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#31

Post by aliakbarkhan »

malnourish wrote: post #26
blueskin_ wrote: post #18

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.

I would appreciate some more detail, too. I've noticed that I find TVT much less engrossing than I did a few years ago, but I thought I'd just grown out of it. If there's an explanation for the decline I would be very interested to hear it.

edit: How accurate is the Encyclopedia Dramatica article on TVT? I normally avoid ED, but I gave in this time because it seems to be pretty comprehensive. edit 2: I found this blog: http://tvtropeshistory.blogspot.com/ Obviously it's hard to verify histories like these, but it seems pretty in-depth.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#32

Post by eric_cc »

fdej wrote: post #27
bunderbunder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't see the distinction you're trying to make here. 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…

/ * @author BigDave1974 over at SlashDot */

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#33

Post by jebus989 »

mikeash wrote: post #13
TillE wrote: post #4

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?

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.

Agree, and Wikipedia does this e.g. for Wikipedia books [0]. If you render any book as a PDF it will append a ~10pt list of all article contributors.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Books

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#34

Post by wwwwwwwwww »

blueskin_ wrote: post #29
malnourish wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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-im…

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.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#35

Post by lifthrasiir »

kevinpet wrote: post #25
lifthrasiir wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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 i…

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).

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#36

Post by wwwwwwwwww »

le_meta wrote: post #2

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

nsfw language warning - afaik the monster girl quest articles proc'd the big porn cleanup fiasco

https://web.archive.org/web/20110908191300/http://tvtropes.o...

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#37

Post by acheron »

eric_cc wrote: post #30
mikeash wrote: post #12

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…

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?

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.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#38

Post by dublinben »

dllthomas wrote: post #28
mikeash wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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...

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

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#39

Post by Flimm »

eric_cc wrote: post #30
mikeash wrote: post #12

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…

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?

I highly recommend learning about copyright and licensing. If you use or contribute to open source software, it's a must, IMO. Here's a post of mine which would be a good start: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11455485/247696

Based on the number of GitHub projects which don't include a LICENSE or COPYING file, I would say you are not alone.

Re: Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

#40

Post by dllthomas »

dublinben wrote: post #38
dllthomas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

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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