Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

http://blog.brentlaabs.com/2013/12/the-edge-of-creative-commons.html

by TuringTest • 12 years ago

172 65 12 years ago

blog.brentlaabs.com

le_meta• 12 years ago

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

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/content_violation_reports.php?r=1

I'm at work, so I won't follow the inner links. The page itself is OK.

smackfu2• 12 years ago

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...

I think porn examples are banned now.

wwwwwwwwww2• 12 years ago

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...

smackfu2• 12 years ago

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.

mikeash8• 12 years ago

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.

bunderbunder• 12 years ago

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 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.

eric_cc2• 12 years ago

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?

labster2• 12 years ago

Original author here: You're right. It hasn't gone anywhere in 6 months, because there's no real angle on getting involved in a legal dispute. There's no money to be gained in suing TVT. And forcing them to take content offline hurts the commons perhaps more than it helps it.

The motivation behind the original blog was at least partially catharsis -- there really are no good options for copyright enforcement of open content. Sure, if it was a few lousy pages, TV Tropes could stand to lose them, but I'm talking about core pages like "Anime" and several tropes of legend initially written by my colleague.

Sure I could send a DCMA request, but they'd have every reason to fight it, and what then? Hire lawyers? Try to delete content that people thought was legal and amended, but actually turned into infringing content? Get them to delete pages on works of fiction of which I am a fan?

All of the options are awful except one: getting people to leave that illegal and immoral site. True morality isn't about protecting children's delicate eyes from textual metapornography, it's about giving back to the people who give to you -- and not just taking more from them.

I recommend either All The Tropes or the Tropes Mirror Wiki on Wikia.

TillE• 12 years ago

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?

capnrefsmmat• 12 years ago

Because Wikipedia makes the complete edit history of every page available, they suggest simply giving a link to the article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_co...

blueskin_5• 12 years ago

Wouldn't giving a pointer to the specific point in the edit history you sourced it from (so people can dig backwards if they care to) be enough? I'd have guessed so (IANAL, etc.).

nandhp• 12 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_co...

It looks like a link is sufficient, or a list of all authors, optionally omitting those with only trivial edits.

rmc• 12 years ago

That was one of the reasons OpenStreetMap moved from CC to the ODbL. There are ~1 million OSM contributors and it is unclear if they all had to be attributed. So they changed the licence.

http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Why_CC_BY-SA_is_U...

mikeash8• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

jebus989• 12 years ago

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

putlake3• 12 years ago

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.

hdevalence• 12 years ago

What the article points out is that (2) is actually not the case, which is why the question arises.

zokier• 12 years ago

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

Would be if they had proper terms of use/service in place. But TVtropes has no terms as far as I can see, which makes the situation whole lot muddier. Basically we are working on an implicit grant of rights to TVtropes from content authors. The disagreement stems on what those rights include.

putlake3• 12 years ago

No argument there. My post said "Typically how this is supposed to work". It doesn't mean TVTropes works like that.

Their current terms of use also have no bearing on their legal right to change the licensing from CC-BY-SA to CC-BY-NC-SA. That depends upon what terms of use they had in place before the conversion.

Their current terms are: if you contribute, we own (the copyright to) all your contributions. That's not only unfair to users, it may even be illegal because in a contract you have to provide some compensation in exchange for the release of copyright.

drdaeman• 12 years ago

For (2) you need users consent to that. That generally means, such provision must be reasonably visible and explained to user when he registers or starts editing. Linked post had shown the only thing user seems to consent before she could start editing to is that she's over 13 years old.

Edit: Oh, also. Everyone, please don't downvote parent post. While one may well disagree with what it says, that post is certainly relevant to the discussion, so pushing it down the comments page isn't a good idea. Even if what said there is plain wrong.

putlake3• 12 years ago

You are right that it's not enough to have ToS; the users should actively accept them. But what was plain wrong about my post? It said typically this is how it's supposed to work, in which the wiki has a right to change its licensing. Not that TVtropes ToS is like that or that what they did was right.

If the only provision of the ToS that you're accepting is that you are over 13, then the wiki has no rights to even distribute your content under CC-BY-SA. So the conversion to NC isn't even relevant.

And in any case, you own copyright to anything you author, unless you expressly transfer them to someone else in exchange for some sort of compensation. Absent that, the blogger of OP is fully able to release his work under any license he chooses. And he did that on his blog. So what's wrong?

lifthrasiir2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

"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.

TuringTest4• 12 years ago

That text was added in November 2013, way after the re-licensing took place. The first nine years of contributions to the wiki didn't include such provision.

perlpimp• 12 years ago

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

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

blueskin_5• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

blueskin_5• 12 years ago

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.

aliakbarkhan• 12 years ago

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.

paulgb• 12 years ago

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-...

fredup• 12 years ago

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...

Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)

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