Wikia and Sony Playing Licensing Mind Tricks 108
TuringTest (533084) writes "Popular culture website Wikia originally hosted its user-contributed content under a free, sharealike Commercial Commons license (CC-BY-SA). At least as soon as 2003, some specific wikis decided to use the non-commercial CC-BY-NC license instead: hey, this license supposedly protects the authors, and anyone is free to choose how they want to license their work anyway, right? However, in late 2012 Wikia added to its License terms of service a retroactive clause for all its non-commercial content, granting Wikia an exclusive right to use this content in commercial contexts, effectively making all CC-BY-NC content dual-licensed. And today, Wikia is publicizing a partnership with Sony to display Wikia content on Smart TVs, a clear commercial use. A similar event happened at TV Tropes when the site owners single-handedly changed the site's copyright notice from ShareAlike to the incompatible NonCommercial, without notifying nor requesting consent from its contributors. Is this the ultimate fate of all wikis? Do Creative Commons licenses hold any weight for community websites?"
Re:Nothing is free (Score:4, Insightful)
Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.
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Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.
Well, you could argue that some people do altruistic acts because it rewards them with a good feeling, similar to how others feel good about amassing money or power or being desired, so ultimately egoistic motivation. The trick is to have a culture and organization of society that makes the best out of peoples different egoistic motivations.
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You always get that in the first 5 minutes of an economics course (to theoretically cover their ass), and then the rest of course is about money. They don't really have any way to verify, measure, or make predictions based on that piece of dogma.
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A brain that rewards itself with a "good feeling" whenever it takes actions that benefit others without an overt reciprocal benefit is, by any useful definition, an "altruistic brain."
Saying "you get a good feeling and therefore you are selfish," is silly, since there is a clear difference between a "selfish" person who exploits the poor and a "selfish" (sic) person who gives generously to the poor.
I didn't call it selfish, I called it an ultimately egoistic motivation. And there clearly is a reciprocal benefit, if you tear yourself lose from the materialistic focus. And there are lots of egoistic motivations that guide our behavior that have nothing to do with exploiting the poor. Fx. to be liked, to be well respected, to be desired, to be looked up to, etc.
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Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.
All hail Dollah!
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Ok, I may regret wanting to know this, but... just what is "tacosnotting?"
Re:Nothing is free (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe selfishness is just human nature and a thing of all times.
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Ha, I'm Canadian! We in the North laugh at your petty squabbles and selfish greed!
I wonder if it'll stop snowing soon?
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Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.
Uncle Ben summed it up. With great power comes great responsibility. The wiki, once it gathered power, stopped being responsible to the people and instead decided to cash in.
This is what happens in a capitalistic world. Shit, it happened here. A corporation bought out the owners of slashdot and now we are having a problem between how slashdot has been and how they want to change it (slashdot beta). The corp only cares about money. When you have something successful like the wiki, corporations s
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Any site claiming so is lying. The owners want mindshare and eyeballs, i.e. you. You are the ultimate product despite whatever you may believe about a site. The owners how to get a large enough audience to get noticed by a bigger player, who them will come in and buy the business. The owners leave to live a happy wealthy life, the users, bitch and moan as normal.
My sites free. I pay to host it. Anyones free to go there, download my content. I've no intention of ever applying ANY license to any of it. You can even use it for commercial purposes if you like. I don't care. If you want to be nice you should throw in an attribution though.
and no, I'm not going to provide a link. I'd prefer to be able to continue to rant on Slashdot with pseudo-anonymity :-D
Copyright by default (Score:5, Informative)
My sites free. I pay to host it. Anyones free to go there, download my content. I've no intention of ever applying ANY license to any of it. You can even use it for commercial purposes if you like. I don't care. If you want to be nice you should throw in an attribution though.
If you don't apply an explicit license, standard copyright applies, and that is "all rights reserved, no copying allowed beyond fair use." I'd recommend applying the CC-BY license [creativecommons.org] or the GNU All-Permissive License [gnu.org] to your pages.
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I think what @Charliemopps is looking for is CC0 :
From https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ [creativecommons.org]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
Creating Content on Someone Else's Site Has Risks (Score:3)
1. IANAL, and, while I'm quite familiar with a lot of copyright issues, I can't venture an expert opinion about whether the license conversions would actually stand up to a lawsuit.
2. That being said, if you're creating and editing content on someone else's website, you've got to face the risk that the content might end up being used in ways of which you don't approve.
Re:Creating Content on Someone Else's Site Has Ris (Score:4, Interesting)
More or less the same thing happened with Gracenote as I recall.
Lots of people created the content in CCDB, and then the organization took it private and said "ours now".
Sooner or later, it seems like every entity which relies on other people to make their content decide that they now own it and can make it closed.
It's a great business model, but it pretty much screws over the people who actually built your product.
Re:Creating Content on Someone Else's Site Has Ris (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a great business model, but it pretty much screws over the people who actually built your product.
...this phrase describes basically every business model, ever.
not really (Score:3)
Even now it's possible to just make a good product, treat your employees right, and sell it for a fair price.
Some personal examples in the woodworking tools category: Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, Veritas Tools.
Re:Creating Content on Someone Else's Site Has Ris (Score:5, Informative)
More or less the same thing happened with Gracenote as I recall.
However, that doesn't really address any of the issues that GP raised.
IANAL either, but generally speaking, a "licensing agreement" is a contract. And again generally speaking, one is not allowed to change the terms of a contract and make them "retroactive". At least not without the consent of all parties involved. If you did, it would no longer meet the very definition of "contract".
I mean, just think about it. Could your cable company say "We're going to make you a 'retroactive' customer and charge you for all past years as well"??? Of course not.
Re:Creating Content on Someone Else's Site Has Ris (Score:5, Interesting)
Your post raises some interesting questions I don't see addressed elsewhere in this thread:
Every user-content-driven site presumably has terms of service which dictate how your contributions can be used. For example, let's say you upload a picture to be used on a UserContentEncyclopedia.com article and you specify the license. UserContentEncyclopedia.com then changes their ToS to say anyone who contributes content to UserContentEncyclopedia.com henceforth or in the past grants them a waiver to use it for commercial purposes, regardless of the terms of the license originally granted.
1. If the ToS also says, "your use of this site signifies your acceptance of these terms", how do you signify that you don't accept? Never visit the site again?
2. If you never "use" the site again, will UserContentEncyclopedia.com realize this, and refrain from using your past contributions commercially since you haven't signified acceptance of the terms? Or will UserContentEncyclopedia.com assume that the continued presence of your past contributions constitutes "use"?
3. Does any site with ToS actually keep track of which registered users have accepted updated ToS?
4. Have ToS clauses such as (1) ever been tested in court, and judged to form the basis of a legally binding contract?
5. What if I don't accept the implied contract that merely visiting a website constitutes acceptance of its ToS?
6. Could someone use the reasoning in (5) to claim they don't accept the implied contract that signing their name on a physical paper contract constitutes acceptance of the terms therein?
Mod parent up (sigh) (Score:2)
1. If the ToS also says, "your use of this site signifies your acceptance of these terms", how do you signify that you don't accept? Never visit the site again?
2. If you never "use" the site again, will UserContentEncyclopedia.com realize this, and refrain from using your past contributions commercially since you haven't signified acceptance of the terms? Or will UserContentEncyclopedia.com assume that the continued presence of your past contributions constitutes "use"?
3. Does any site with ToS actually keep track of which registered users have accepted updated ToS?
4. Have ToS clauses such as (1) ever been tested in court, and judged to form the basis of a legally binding contract?
5. What if I don't accept the implied contract that merely visiting a website constitutes acceptance of its ToS?
6. Could someone use the reasoning in (5) to claim they don't accept the implied contract that signing their name on a physical paper contract constitutes acceptance of the terms therein?
These are some very good points; you should at least get an account so that they start at a Score of +1 or +2 instead of 0, and are more likely to be seen.
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Well, an EULA is a contract. Courts have upheld that the terms of an EULA can be changed arbitrarily by the ones who issued it.
Since you've already agreed to the changes they make in the future
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Well, an EULA is a contract. Courts have upheld that the terms of an EULA can be changed arbitrarily by the ones who issued it.
Not only is that a very gross generalization, it is untrue in almost all cases.
First off, a EULA is a license agreement for use of a product. ToS is for a service. That's not nitpicking, it is in fact an extremely important difference.
I studied EULAs rather extensively in Business Law at university. Their history is interesting and also legally very important. As it turns out, EULAs have been tried by the manufacturers and distributors for just about every kind of product in existence. There was even
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Even so, I was already unimpressed with a trick I caught them using a couple of months or
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That being said, if you're creating and editing content on someone else's website, you've got to face the risk that the content might end up being used in ways of which you don't approve.
You can always host stuff on your own website. Even then someone might use your content, and you're out of luck because they can pay their lawyers indefinitely and you're just a guy with a website.
Copyright owners (Score:3)
So what do the actual copyright owners say?
The people who put stuff on those sites under a CC-BY-NC license?
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they licensed their content to be used as the website sees fit with no hope of compensation
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No, they didn't. The license to use content "as the website sees fit" was included way after the content was created.
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and i bet there was a clause in the original license saying they can change it any time they want
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There always is.
"I have altered our deal. Pray I don't alter it further."
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Hmmm, which of these 3 did you mean?
Quite frankly, with Sony, any of those is a viable option.
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and i bet there was a clause in the original license saying they can change it any time they want
RTFA, [wikia.com] the CC license explicitly forbids doing that:
No term or provision of this License shall be deemed waived and no breach consented to unless such waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by the party to be charged with such waiver or consent.
This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional p
Assignment of copyright (Score:5, Informative)
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In the US, a copyright assignment is not valid unless done in writing. (Google up copyright assignment writing, for instance http://www.copyrightcodex.com/... [copyrightcodex.com] ). So either tvtropes is clueless, or that doesn't mean what you think it means.
Re:Assignment of copyright (Score:5, Informative)
It does it now, but it didn't do it then. That's the core of the matter at both Wikia and TV Tropes. The large majority of both websites was only contributed to them under a Creative Commons license.
TV Tropes is clueless. They made the license change because they discovered that someone had created a (partial) fork [wikiindex.org], and were outraged when they learned that they couldn't legally put it down. Since then, another fork has been created [wikiindex.org] containing the complete content of the last version released unambiguously as CC-BY-SA in summer 2012, including all the content that was censored because of Google Ads. It's a fascinating story, really.
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Is there an article available that details this? wikiindex is pretty vague; I'd be interested in finding out just what pages were censored and if there's discussion about it on tvtropes.
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In the US, a copyright assignment is not valid unless done in writing.
True, but now I want to see how copyright law determines whether "an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent." I take "in writing" to refer to being "fixed in a tangible medium", such as anything stored in the server's access log or a user properties table. And if clicking something amounting to "I agree to these terms" on the get known page doesn't constitute "signed", this wo
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Clicking something amounting to "I agree to these terms" may very well be legally binding, but it didn't happen in those sites. They were careless enough not to provide such wording either in their post forms nor their Terms of Use.
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and i bet there was a clause in the original license saying they can change it any time they want
How would that be possible? Only the copyright holder can change the license under which their copyrighted works can be used. Now this site seems to have added terms to their site that claim "by using our site, you give up any restriction that your content cannot be used for commercial uses". That has at least big, big problems. First obviously copyrighted works by people using the site at some point in the past, but not anymore. Using such content is obvious copyright infringement since the copyright holde
Re:Copyright owners (Score:4, Interesting)
I think there's a bit of confusion with these sites that I agree should be cleared up.
It's not that the authors are licensing the content to the service under the CC-BY-NC license - more often than not, they're just giving the content to the service with no strings attached whatsoever.
The service then applies a CC-BY-NC license to that content for third parties to make use of, but that doesn't mean the service can't change the license around at a later time.
Because authors just gave the content away freely and willingly (albeit perhaps not knowingly, in terms of the extent), they don't really have grounds for complaint other than moral grounds.
Re:Copyright owners (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. Since the website doesn't have permission under copyright law to use the content, the only thing that allows Wikia to publish content they didn't create is the license under which editors have given them such permission. Users *are* licensing the content to the service under the CC-BY-NC license - they're contributing to a derivative work published under that license, so the combined work must be under the license per the terms of the CC.
So the "willingly giving" of content was provided under a very specific license, which is the reason why many users bother to contribute at all. Not honoring the license is not only morally wrong, it's also illegal.
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Per your sig I understand you're probably better informed than I am on these matters.
I do wonder though whether or not you are correct in this case.
Let's say I've got a piece of software and I decide to publish that under the GPL.
Somebody sends me a piece of code to include in the software.
I add it, and release it, still under the GPL. Then later on, I decide to release the code under, say, the BSD license - including the bit that was contributed by Somebody.
Whether or not I can do so depends on what licen
This has come up in the linux kernel (Score:4, Informative)
And the legal opinion there was that to switch licenses would require the approval of every copyright holder.
By contributing to the codebase they did not actually assign you copyright...so each contributor holds copyright in the portion that they actually wrote.
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Re:Copyright owners (Score:4, Informative)
You'd better as hell request an explicit permission to distribute the code from any contributor to your code base, and clarify in the post forms the conditions under which any contribution can be used.
what they actually did was contribute to a codebase - a codebase under my control, and one that I can slap any which license on that I like.
Utterly wrong. Under copyright laws, you can only relicense content that you created, or for which you've been given explicit ownership permissions; if Somebody gave you the code only under the original GPL and didn't assign copyright to you, in order to relicense the code you must first remove any such contribution, so that the result only contains the parts you wrote - otherwise, you'll break their copyright.
This is what is going on in both wikis - the only license under which they published their work at first was the CC-BY-SA (or CC-BY-NC for some Wikias), which is the reason for the sites becoming popular in the first place as many users wouldn't bother to contribute under more restrictive licenses; and neither site requested ownership rights until recently.
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That's the part that I'm wondering about, though.
Did Somebody actually give me code under the GPL - or did they just... give me code? At which point, should one assume it is just a gift (which you can do with as you please), that it was implied that it would be under the GPL because the project it's intended for is under the GPL, or that in fact I couldn't do anything with that code other than as stipulated in any particular communication surroundin
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Did you get that in writing? If not, don't treat it as a gift. If you include it in the GPL code without explicit permission, you may taint the whole project. In fact, many people contribute to FLOSS and Open Knowledge projects with the explicit expectation that it won't be relicensed, and we refrain from contributing to such projects without those guarantees - so yes, there's a strong expectation that contributing to a GPL project is done under GPL terms and no others. The GPL was explicitly designed with
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If they just sent you code with no license whatsoever, what they actually gave you is All Rights Reserved, and you may not use it at all. Period. There is no concept of "gift" in copyright.
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That's interesting. There is a difference between emailing the code to the maintainer and having them put it into the repository, versus getting check-in privileges and updating the repository yourself. Doing it through a web interface makes it very ambiguous though. I could see arguments both ways.
Ultimately, it just needs to be stated clearly which model the site is using so people know what they are getting into.
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As far as I can tell, unless you have a copyright assignment from the person who wrote the copyrighted material, there is no reason to think you would have ownership of the copyrighted material. This is why many companies that operate in such a model make you go through a process to become a contributer.
Just e-mailing something to someone doesn't assign them copyright, and I think that sort of thing was decided long ago with mailing manuscripts.
The web interface still is the same. In no case has anyone been
CC-BY-NC are excluded (Score:5, Informative)
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However, the "Commercial Use Waiver" still allows Wikia any form of commercial use for any derivative work.
There was in the Forum [memory-alpha.org] a proposal to change the wording and "make it clear that the scope and purpose of the waiver is for the placement of ads", however that clarification never arrived to the LIcensing page. What happened to those good intentions?
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Or include a copyright assignment in the fine print on the submission terms - if you own the copyright on contributions then you can do whatever you want, contributor wishes be damned. I really hope that isn't what happened here.
It looks like an assignment (Score:2)
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Unless you transferred copyright you absolutely can - if you licensed content under the CC-BY-NC then only *you* can change the license terms, and Wikia is acting illegally if it uses your content in a commercial setting. You don't have *exclusive* rights to collaborative content, but unless they strip out *everything* you contributed they can't relicense without your permission. That's one of the reasons that Linux, for example, is firmly committed to GPLv2 - Linus stripped out the "or any later version"
Why "clear commercial use"? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly the problem with "NC". To you, this is "clear commercial use". Is it because a big company is involved? Two companies? We assume money is changing hands, but... maybe it's not. The license says "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation". What if the money goes towards "supporting the community"? What exactly is "commercial advantage" in this context? I'd have to ask a lawyer, and... unless I was paying them to advise on a specific case, I doubt they'd actually give a straight answer.
Overall, "noncommercial" licenses are problematic and should be avoided. I understand the intention, but it's hard to make a license that actually gets there.
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You can bet Sony will be advertising as hell this feature in their Smart TVs marketing campaigns. Last time I checked selling TVs was a commercial activity.
Re:Why "clear commercial use"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they simply display it in a browser-like interface, while preserving the essential webpageyness of the content? If so, I'd call that no more "noncommercial" than using Internet Explorer on Windows to visit Wikia directly. If, however, they've completely butchered the content to fit their marketing department's retarded whims and removed any traces of attribution in the process, that clearly goes well beyond grey area.
We've already accepted that every TV will eventually function as a more-or-less fully capable streaming media center; we also need to accept the implications of that on exactly the present issue. If device-X has a web browser, does device-X need a special license to view any webpage not explicitly marked as free-for-all? And if so, why doesn't MSIE need the same license? What if the TV runs Win8 and actually displays the content in MSIE?
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It depends on whether they plan to use this feature to sell more TVs.
Merely allowing the site to be accessed through the product features is not commercial by itself, but if the links are included by default in a prominent place (and we know they will), that counts as product placement and branding; and it can definitely be considered a commercial purpose - people pay money to that kind of placement.
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It depends on whether they plan to use this feature to sell more TVs.
Merely allowing the site to be accessed through the product features is not commercial by itself, but if the links are included by default in a prominent place (and we know they will), that counts as product placement and branding; and it can definitely be considered a commercial purpose - people pay money to that kind of placement.
I'm not saying that this interpretation is necessarily wrong, but... it's quite wide in scope. It seems like you are saying that not only would hosting NC content on a site with ads be disallowed, but that merely prominently linking to such content from a site with ads would be disallowed, as would any advertising for any commercial software or hardware which implied that NC content could be accessed.
Furthermore, the suggestion that if some people sometimes pay for a particular activity, then all instances
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I didn't suggest that activities activities which are sometimes done for money are always commercial.
I meant that activities for promoting commercial products should always be considered commercial (even if the promotion itself is not paid), as they're always intended to produce a sale; which is different.
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If it's "Non-commercial" then why is there an agreement?
I suspect that, if Sony was going to use the site, they realize most people will never update their TVs, so they had to have some assurances that the site and its format, API, etc... would remain the same. Why would wikia agree to that? Oh sure Sony, out of the kindness of our hearts we'll maintain this in-perpetuity for you! No... Sony's giving them money to maintain the site in the certain way. It's clearly commercial.
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Yeah, I was aiming for that as the "from" department. You can't trust editors, but you can always trust the Anonymous Coward for lame jokes ;-)
Interesting Development (Score:1)
Because At The End Of The Day (Score:3)
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What you call "honesty", sharp players call "foolishly giving away tactical surprise."
Cuz, you know, some of the suckas making them rich might object if someone explained to them that they were being suckas.
Never forget that "dumb" fits nicely between "fat" and "happy".
Don't use Wikia. Plain and simple. (Score:2)
You're putting stuff on THEIR systems. So you're supposedly going to trust them?
They can't even keep their stupid adware system malware free on a month-by-month basis. And you think that's an ACCIDENT?
To quote The Rainmaker: (Score:2)
"...playing the odds that the insured would not consult an attorney."
People who don't own their own businesses or aren't involved in the higher levels of a corporation don't realize that much of business behavior is defined by the expectation of the likelihood of being sued.
Of course they can't legally just retroactively f*** everyone over, but who is going to stop them when they're likely privately indemnified by SONY.
That's just one of the negatives of capitalism - most people try to get away with everyth
Simple solution (Score:2)
Delete your wiki edits/comments, so they cannot claim ownership of what you wrote.
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No, but advertising that feature does. You anonymous coward.
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Iv'e added a retroactive clause to my browser the supersedes the Wikia and Tropes copyright claims that says I own all the content I create through that browser and do not surrender any copyright when I add content to a wiki, wikia, message board, facebook or any other website.
See, you may actually have found the solution to the problem. If you put that in your User Agent, it will be recorded in their server logs, and they can't claim that it can't be applied retroactively without invalidating their own terms.
Wikia is evil (Score:1)