GethN7/My feelings on TV Tropes' copyright limitations

When TV Tropes was licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0, they could use content from Wikipedia, but refused to, even if that content would have given them a good jump start for an article they could have retooled for their own purposes.

They also had a ton of freedom to copy from a large array of other sources around the internet to do with as they would.

However, for some baffling reason, they had a hatred of Wikipedia or other WMF wikis. Granted, they had a mission statement of not being as formal, but seriously, what ever stopped them from taking that "boring Wikipedia prose" and turning it into something more informal?

Also, while they had every right to remove copyright infringing material while still using that license, they was nothing to my knowledge stopping them from taking advantage of that resource so long as they attributed the original source properly.

However, they decided to change their license to CC BY NC SA 3.0 in July 2012, one month after a private dump of their June 2012 content was made and later released to the public via a torrent by administrator Vorticity (aka Brent Laabs). There was nothing illegal about this dump of their content (search engines and the Internet Wayback Machine do this all the time), especially since it was released under the CC BY SA 3.0 license and the original site was attributed as best as was legally and technically possible.

I have no smoking gun proof that they changed their license to discourage further attempts to copy and disseminate the work of TV Tropes (if so, the only thing they did was change the licensing it could be re-released under), but the fact they made it impossible for search engines to spider source pages (you have to be logged into TV Tropes to view them) and have accused the administrators of this site and the Tropes Mirror Wiki of "stealing because we can" seems to indicate that it never crossed their minds a serious effort could be made to dump their site and fork it (the half hearted efforts of the original TMW founder Jack Butler notwithstanding) and that it would be perfectly legal to do so without even asking them (which is not required under the licensing TV Tropes released their content circa June 2012), but it seems that steps have been taken to make sure no one else can ever do that again without their explicit permission.

If so, they have, in my humble opinion, shot themselves in the foot concerning content, since they cannot use content from wikis incompatible with CC BY NC SA licensing anymore, which includes practically all of the Wikimedia Foundation's wikis, nor a huge portion of most websites that also used CC BY SA licensing, and since these resources could have been used to enhance their present content or act as a springboard for expanding their own, they have permanently slammed that door in their own face for reasons that will forever baffle me.

From a legal standpoint, they have, according to my reading of Creative Commons, circumvented the protocols dictating how they could license their content by changing it to an incompatible license midstream without going through legal channels to verify this was legally sound, which puts all content licensed past June 2012 into a legal limbo the ATT administration is rather loathe to touch due to legal uncertainty, and while we have to make do with our current fork and build off that, I am less concerned about that than I am the legal status of the content on TV Tropes at present, which is still legally unresolved as far as I know.

However, what strikes me as the most saddening aspect of this affair is that TV Tropes is a wiki like ATT, but it's leadership seems to want to dictate under what terms their content can be redistributed and wants to restrict information they submitted under a free license as they see fit, which is contrary to the spirit of a community based project based on the dissemination of knowledge (in the case, about tropes and the works that use them), and to my knowledge, was done without the knowledge or input of their community for reasons that are baffling to me and potentially disquieting for the members of TV Tropes and for the rest of the free licensing using world.

However, while I see no future in saving TV Tropes from what it has done to itself so long as it's current leadership continues down what I feel is a destructive road for a community based project, I personally am firmly committed to not interfering with the rights of my community to spread and reproduce the content of this wiki, so long as they follow the guidelines of CC BY SA and whatever other conditions are legally required, but that aside have no intentions of ever denying anyone the right to make use of our content otherwise.

As someone who believes wikis can only benefit from knowledge being free, I despair for those of the troping community on TV Tropes now limited by their dubious license change and recent language in their bylaws that restrain the intellectual freedoms of their contributors, but I continue to hold hope that by allowing my own community to prosper without such chains binding their intellectual freedom and integrity that their ability to spread knowledge will be immeasurably enhanced in the long run.