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."
You get what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
Private Equity Again (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that Internet Brands was bought by a private equity firm a couple years ago. This stupidity is consistent with the private equity way of doing business. They always seem to have a really poor understanding of the businesses they buy. And indeed they don't need to, since their business model seems to be acquire, pillage, and abandon.
This is what I most hold against a certain private equity capitalist who's now running for President. Bain is most often criticized for costing people their jobs, but layoffs can be justified if cutting back helps save the company.
But Bain never saved anything. The acquired previously healthy companies and drove them into the ground. Inasmuch as they actually tried to run them, they did so ineptly. But mostly they just found ways to pass assets onto their own investors and pay themselves fat management fees in the process.
So of course Internet Brands is acting stupidly Stupidity has become a valid business model!
My Horse Is Higher Than Yours (Score:1, Insightful)
People that know how to write know that it is mandatory to define non-standard terms and to expand acronyms upon first use, rather similarly to how programmers must declare their types or variables.
The whole point of writing is to make clear to the reader the idea that you are attempting to impart. The writer wants to paint a clear picture in the reader's mind. The writer should not want to challenge the reader or his/her abilities and the writer certainly should not want to frustrate the reader.
Now, some writers are not very good and any writer can make a mistake. It is for these reasons that publications, such as Slashdot, have editors. The editors are supposed to perform the final quality control, if you will, on to-be published material. They are supposed to spell check, grammar check, and even alter the writer's work for correctness, clarity and sometimes brevity. This being Slashdot though, the editors will continue to be shit slinging monkeys, trying to get the poop to stick on the walls.
See what happens when you Google this: STFU!
Re:Good (Score:0, Insightful)
Please dont feed the trolls.
Sincerely,
The internet.
Re:Private Equity Again (Score:0, Insightful)
"... acquire, pillage, and abandon." Yup, sounds like the Republican plans for the future of America to me!
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what the percentages are but I would say gutting is done more often.
I wish we would get some actual investigative journalism on Bain's record. All I've heard so far are one-off cases cherry-picked to support the advocacy position that the particular cherry-picker wants to make. I'd like to a see a comprehensively researched table listing every company Bain took over and the various results of the time before, during and after Bain's involvement.
Re:My Horse Is Higher Than Yours (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't be daft. I could walk into my office and ask who knows what CC is and after dealing with the multiple "carbon copy!" answers there'd be around 3 out of 40 people that would know.
the 'wikitravel community' is not the same thing (Score:5, Insightful)
as the 'wikitravel company'. the company doesnt own the 'community'.
Trademarks vs. free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
I was active in Wikitravel at the time Internet Brands bought the site. They knew damn well that the content was CC-BY-SA licensed and what that meant (that the content was not theirs, and could be taken and reproduced anywhere), and they explicitly promised the community that they would abide by the terms of that license. Obviously they have no intention of doing so, as demonstrated by the fact that they have spent the last several years dragging their feet about their promises to make the content easily portable.
Suing volunteer contributors for casually using the name "wikitravel" in reference to a community of contributors which existed long before IB bought the trademark rights to the web site, is unconscionable. Trademark rights are intended to prevent customers from being ripped off by other companies, not to squelch the free-speech rights of individuals to talk about the company. This is fundamentally no different from if employees of Widget Corp identified themselves as "employees of Widget Corp" and talked about why they were organizing a strike, or calling for a boycott, or threatening to quit.
IB owns a domain name and the exclusive rights to use the mark "Wikitravel" in trade. That is all. They do not control the right to say "Wikitravel" or to talk about "the Wikitravel community" in reference to the people who use the web site that IB hosts.