Internet Brands Sues People For Forking Under CC BY-SA 168
David Gerard writes "Internet Brands bought Wikitravel.org in 2006, plastered it with ads and neglected it. After years, the Wikitravel community finally decided to fork under CC by-sa and move to Wikimedia. Internet Brands is now suing two of the unpaid volunteers for wanting to leave. The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a declaratory judgement (PDF) that you can actually fork a free-content project without permission. Internet Brands has a track record of scorched-earth litigation tactics."
Re:CC by-sa? (Score:5, Informative)
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.
Re:It's theirs no matter what they did with it. (Score:5, Informative)
But it's not content theft; the volunteers who are forking via Wikitravel via CC-sa are obeying the license that the source site uses; it's even on the original site right now:
"Wikitravel uses a copyleft license for all text, images, and other content on the Web site. Anyone can use Wikitravel content according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license."
via: http://wikitravel.org/shared/Copyleft [wikitravel.org]
Re:CC by-sa? (Score:5, Informative)
"CC by-sa" means:
Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.
Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work.
There is not any other restriction on commercial use of the work, or making derivative works based on it.
(source: Wikipedia)
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Informative)
How can they not understand that volunteers are exactly that: someone volunteering. And their volunteering can cease at any time. They should be countersued for abuse of legal procedures.
Well, a little background on who Internet Brands is and what their business model is might help....
From wikipedia: The company was founded in 1998 as CarsDirect.com, launched from the business incubator Idealab. The company invented a consumer-advocacy approach to selling cars "haggle-free" online, an approach it continues to employ.[9] In 2000, Roger Penske invested in the company and joined the Board of Directors. In 2002, Time Magazine voted the site one of the 50 best in the world.[10]
The company changed its name to Internet Brands in 2005.[11] The company's IPO was in November 2007 on the NASDAQ exchange.[12] INET was added to the NASDAQ Internet Index on March 22, 2010.[13]
Internet Brands is headquartered in El Segundo, California; Autodata is headquartered in London, Ontario.
Internet Brands agreed to be acquired for $640 million by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman in September 2010,[14][15] and was thus delisted from NASDAQ.
Might be more interesting now to find out who Hellman & Friedman are...
Also from wikipedia: Hellman & Friedman LLC (H&F) is a private equity firm, founded in 1984 by Warren Hellman[2][3] and Tully Friedman,[note 1] that makes investments primarily through leveraged buyouts and minority growth capital investments.
Dunno about you, but LBO people don't set well with me after an LBO killed a company I worked for, which would have been worth at least a billion $ annually, had they invested in us rather than suck us dry like a bunch of leeches. YMMV
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Informative)
LBO - Private Equity - aka Corporate Raider: buy a company with little money down, load acquired company up with debt, charge acquired company millions of dollars in "fees" for "consulting", and then if company is still successful sucker the....do an IPO and if the acquired company goes belly up, stick the...put the company into bankruptcy and let the creditors eat it after siphoning millions of dollars out of the company. In the meantime, honest hardworking people - people who actually have to work for a living - get canned without so much as a handshake and the Private Equity guys walk away with millions or billions of dollars of equity that was sucked out of the company.
A great illustration of this technique was the bar that Paulie bought in the movie GoodFellas: run up the restaurant's credit, buy Cutty Sark, sell the booze at a discount, and when the restaurant goes bankrupt, burn it down the for insurance money. The only difference is that the Private Equity guys do the legal version.
That's how Mitt Romney made his millions: by fucking over small investors and banks.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Informative)
This has nothing to do with them being volunteers, and very little to do with the fork.
If you read the actual suit, you will find tha tthe actual complaints are trademark violations, among some other things.
From the suit, they are claiming that the 'unpaid volunteers' decided to fork the site (which they admit they can do). However, the admins then went on WikiTravel's site and made posts stating that 'WikiTravel (a trademark) was moving to WikiMedia'. It is not. In addition, they claim, these volunteers sent out emails to WikiTravel's customers, using WiikiTravel's email accounts, and again stated in these emails that WikiTravel was moving to WikiMedia.
If true, that is not 'forking a project', it is lying and forgery.
No Love for Internet Brands (Score:4, Informative)
As a former employee of theirs (worked for a company that IB bought, left about a month post-acquisition), I can't say I'm surprised. It was clear they had no interest in developing or maintaining a quality product, but that their business model was simply to milk their assets for revenue while leaving them to wither on the vine. Several weeks after the acquisition closed they brought the hatchet down, and in return for severance pay, asked all fired employees had to agree *never to apply for a job at IB or any subsidiaries, ever* - not that it was really a risk, but WTF?
Will be nice to see them get spanked.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:2, Informative)
LBO - Private Equity - aka Corporate Raider: buy a company with little money down, load acquired company up with debt, charge acquired company millions of dollars in "fees" for "consulting", and then if company is still successful sucker the....do an IPO and if the acquired company goes belly up, stick the...put the company into bankruptcy and let the creditors eat it after siphoning millions of dollars out of the company. In the meantime, honest hardworking people - people who actually have to work for a living - get canned without so much as a handshake and the Private Equity guys walk away with millions or billions of dollars of equity that was sucked out of the company.
A great illustration of this technique was the bar that Paulie bought in the movie GoodFellas: run up the restaurant's credit, buy Cutty Sark, sell the booze at a discount, and when the restaurant goes bankrupt, burn it down the for insurance money. The only difference is that the Private Equity guys do the legal version.
That's how Mitt Romney made his millions: by fucking over small investors and banks.
And the private equity people usually are using someone else's money, rarely putting their own into the mix, but collecting their wages as "administrative fee" Our LBO people leveraged our own assets to buy us, plus some investor money. They're rule of thum was 1 in 5 companies go bust anyway, no matter what you do, so they work on keeping 4 companies going, hoping to spin them off or sell assets for a profit, while they draw "administrative fees" from the 5th company until it's fully wound down and dies, leaving the bank and their own investors with a loss. Not particularly the sort of success story you'll hear Mitt going on about.
Re:the trademark claims are bogus (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know what you were reading, but they clearly do state the claim.
29. For example, on August 18, 2012, Holliday improperly and
wrongfully emailed at least several hundred of Wikitravel members, purporting to
be from Wikitravel and informing members that the Wikitravel Website was
“migrating” to the Wikimedia Foundation. Upon information and belief, the
number emailed is far greater.
30. Specifically, Holliday’s email contained the Subject Line, “Important
information about Wikitravel” and its body stated, “This email is being sent to you
on behalf of the Wikitravel administrators since you have put some real time and
effort into working on Wikitravel. We wanted to make sure that you are up to
date and in the loop regarding big changes in the community that will affect the
future of your work! As you may already have heard, Wikitravel’s community is
looking to migrate to the Wikimedia Foundation.”
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting points, but in paragraphs 24 and 34 of the suit [ibsrv.net] they quite much seem to claim a "violation of the [CC BY-SA] License" and that "the creation of 'Wiki Travel Guide' has been done without proper attribution". The alleged trademark infringement happened when the volunteer admin wrote to the Wikitravel users in an e-mail that the "Wikitravel community" was migrating to Wikimedia Foundation, which is obviously different from claiming that "Wikitravel" (the site) was migrating to Wikimedia (a view also admitted by Internet Brands in the suit.)
Anyway, just because someone somewhere mentioned your trademark in context that did not please you is not grounds for damages. What IB seems to claim is that the supposed Wikimedia hosted travel website would infringe its trademark - before it has even launched! Given that they only own a trademark for a travel website "Wikitravel", anyone should be able to launch a new website with different name.
Given that they are making such claims of trademark and license violations even before those have happened (obviously you can not infringe with a non-existing product or not give attribution before you actually start distributing the content), it seems like a desperate last resort effort to stop the split by suing a few individuals to me.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Informative)
Re:the trademark claims are bogus (Score:4, Informative)
...made posts stating that 'WikiTravel (a trademark) was moving to WikiMedia'.
I doubt that's what they posted.
Posting the trademark symbol next to the word WikiTravel on August 18th, 2012, is illegal and it's a finable offense. The filing of the trademark only occurred on August 22nd, 2012 [uspto.gov], coincidentally just four days after the alleged incident. And no, pay no attention to "FIRST USE: 20030724. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 2003072", that part won't help them.
The fine for falsely claiming a Trademark is pretty significant. I don't think it's a mistake they would have made. You'll notice that the current site [wikitravel.org] doesn't even have the trademark symbol anywhere yet, although technically they now have the right to use the symbol since August 22nd.
29. For example, on August 18, 2012, Holliday improperly and wrongfully emailed at least several hundred of Wikitravel members, purporting to be from Wikitravel and informing members that the Wikitravel Website was “migrating” to the Wikimedia Foundation. Upon information and belief, the number emailed is far greater.
I'll assume that this is still their interpretation and their paraphrasing of what happened, since there are no quotes that are used except for one single word.
So moving right along...
30. Specifically, Holliday’s email contained the Subject Line, “Important information about Wikitravel” and its body stated, “This email is being sent to you on behalf of the Wikitravel administrators since you have put some real time and effort into working on Wikitravel. We wanted to make sure that you are up to date and in the loop regarding big changes in the community that will affect the future of your work! As you may already have heard, Wikitravel’s community is looking to migrate to the Wikimedia Foundation.”
Ok, now we're getting somewhere!
They're finally quoting the people they're suing. Please note the careful wording inside those quotes: "on behalf of the Wikitravel administrators" and "Wikitravel's community is looking to migrate to the Wikimedia Foundation."
Is anything of this really untrue?
It seems to me like Internet Brands only started clamping down on its unpaid volunteer administrators only after they sent this message out, so they were still formally volunteer admins at the time? Right? That's the problem of giving volunteers unfettered access to your mailing list and web site. You can't just accept the benefit of all their work, you have to also accept all the downside that could possibly come from giving them such privileges (especially if they're not getting paid by you).
Plus, it's not like Internet Brands can't have the final word in all of this. I'm sure that they promptly locked down their mailing list and possibly locked down their wiki site as well, thus possibly locking out even more existing volunteers from participating in the discussion, and then sent follow-up emails telling their own side of the story.
In the end, owning the actual mailing list and the actual site gives them the final word. And the people that were contacted will have to make up their minds whether the community is still mostly with Wikitravel, or migrated elsewhere. That being said, I'm not a lawyer, and this is only my layman opinion regarding the reported Trademark claim made in the parent post. Perhaps the other claims they're making have more teeth to them, those other parts I really know nothing about.