You're wrong on a couple of details, Nylor. First of all, we're going to have to restrict what content is on the site anyway, because of the rampant phenomenon of crtl+c/ctrl+v. That's going to be inherent to the site no matter what copyright we choose, although its certainly more tempting to import things from TVT directly than any other site. Secondly, you can bring things over from TVT if you get the page's creators to grant a CC-BY-SA or more permissive license. Tertiarywise, I'm not 100% sure that something like a bare list of tropes is creative enough to even be copyrightable -- and if it is, we might have a educational fair use reason for using it anyway.
The big thing here is that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), we would qualify for DMCA Safe Harbor on user-submitted content. So until someone sends us a letter telling us to take down specific pages -- and we choose not to take them down -- we aren't really opening ourselves to liability. It isn't our job as administrators to ensure that our content is all legal when it's posted, but it is our job to ensure that any infringing content is removed when we're informed about it through appropriate legal channels. (However, I'm not even sure that TV Tropes would have legal standing to even send a takedown request, given that it's not the copyright owner, and they make no attempt to request ownership (or even a license, explicitly). But that's a question for a real lawyer, since it's a bit out of my league.)
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The big thing here is that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), we would qualify for DMCA Safe Harbor on user-submitted content. So until someone sends us a letter telling us to take down specific pages -- and we choose not to take them down -- we aren't really opening ourselves to liability. It isn't our job as administrators to ensure that our content is all legal when it's posted, but it is our job to ensure that any infringing content is removed when we're informed about it through appropriate legal channels. (However, I'm not even sure that TV Tropes would have legal standing to even send a takedown request, given that it's not the copyright owner, and they make no attempt to request ownership (or even a license, explicitly). But that's a question for a real lawyer, since it's a bit out of my league.)
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