Did a little reading of what links refer to my blog out of curiosity (both via Blogger and Google search), and it seems Fighteer wrote this interesting article on the copyright situation on TV Tropes:
http://lementalia.wordpress.com/2015/0 ... licensing/
It seems to have been written slightly before Drew undid half of the copyright wrongs on TV Tropes, and Fighteer did have the decency to admit he's not a lawyer, so I can't really blast him for talking out his butt. I'd argue some of his facts about CC licensing are dead wrong, but I'd have to be an attorney to decisively do so, so I'll hold my tongue.
I will say, however, he seems to have some badly wrong ideas why were we pissed:
1. We weren't pissed because we wanted to profit off of the content (quite the opposite)
2. We weren't pissed because we want monetary payment for damages (those would be hard to prove, we just were offended at the idea someone might try to legally claim we surrendered our rights to rerelease the content we submitted there personally elsewhere, since that is in contravention of CC licensing.
3. This wasn't done just to spite TV Tropes (if anything, we just wanted them to obey the same copyright law everyone else, us included, is bound by).
4. Yes, we can claim ownership of certain edits (but only if they are illegal terms). Otherwise, he makes a good point about one cannot ask one's contributions to be taken down for the hell of it, only if they are being used under illegal terms, in which case we could ask for proper redress to address the illegal usage.
5. His entire line of reasoning about how it's hard to prove our identity for purposes of identifying one's work shows an apparent lack of knowledge how the DMCA and wikis work.
5a. To be fair, even with the Wayback Machine, TV Tropes has openly admitted to burning evidence of older server logs to preserve space, so the onus of proving things was made more difficult by them.
6. Similarly, he seems convinced TV Tropes could just change it's licensing globally without prior consent from the community. Apparently, he's unaware of the precedent set by Wikipedia when they proved that false by them having to work out a deal with Richard Stallman to add CC BY SA licensing to their terms as well as the GDFL.
Again, he did say it was all his personal opinion, not representative of his role as TVT moderator and since I'm not a lawyer either, I'm not going to legally challenge his opinions, but speaking personally myself, I believe he's dead wrong on several of his points and find it deeply troubling he believes such apparent inaccuracies on a site where he exercises any form of authority over community contributions.
http://lementalia.wordpress.com/2015/0 ... licensing/
It seems to have been written slightly before Drew undid half of the copyright wrongs on TV Tropes, and Fighteer did have the decency to admit he's not a lawyer, so I can't really blast him for talking out his butt. I'd argue some of his facts about CC licensing are dead wrong, but I'd have to be an attorney to decisively do so, so I'll hold my tongue.
I will say, however, he seems to have some badly wrong ideas why were we pissed:
1. We weren't pissed because we wanted to profit off of the content (quite the opposite)
2. We weren't pissed because we want monetary payment for damages (those would be hard to prove, we just were offended at the idea someone might try to legally claim we surrendered our rights to rerelease the content we submitted there personally elsewhere, since that is in contravention of CC licensing.
3. This wasn't done just to spite TV Tropes (if anything, we just wanted them to obey the same copyright law everyone else, us included, is bound by).
4. Yes, we can claim ownership of certain edits (but only if they are illegal terms). Otherwise, he makes a good point about one cannot ask one's contributions to be taken down for the hell of it, only if they are being used under illegal terms, in which case we could ask for proper redress to address the illegal usage.
5. His entire line of reasoning about how it's hard to prove our identity for purposes of identifying one's work shows an apparent lack of knowledge how the DMCA and wikis work.
5a. To be fair, even with the Wayback Machine, TV Tropes has openly admitted to burning evidence of older server logs to preserve space, so the onus of proving things was made more difficult by them.
6. Similarly, he seems convinced TV Tropes could just change it's licensing globally without prior consent from the community. Apparently, he's unaware of the precedent set by Wikipedia when they proved that false by them having to work out a deal with Richard Stallman to add CC BY SA licensing to their terms as well as the GDFL.
Again, he did say it was all his personal opinion, not representative of his role as TVT moderator and since I'm not a lawyer either, I'm not going to legally challenge his opinions, but speaking personally myself, I believe he's dead wrong on several of his points and find it deeply troubling he believes such apparent inaccuracies on a site where he exercises any form of authority over community contributions.