Quote:Another TroperWaitamoment, guys, I just had an idea:
Fast Eddie made a lot of drama when Geth told him that he can copy stuff from TV Tropes if it's from June 2012 or older. That was for wikia which is flooded with ads. Since then they have a different license that only allows non-commercial use.
But you said that ATT will never use ads. Doesn't that mean you can copy all you want from TVTropes?
I'm no lawyer, but it'd be pretty cool if we could copy the new movies and anime and such from them.
Legally speaking, the reason we cannot and will not use material from TV Tropes from July 2012 or later is twofold:
1. Content from TV Tropes up until July 2012 was CC BY SA licensed. Anything afterwards in not compatible with our own license in terms of reuse and redistribution, since you can't just switch licenses on people without their consent, which is a violation of Creative Commons licensing which bring us to-
2. We, frankly, aren't entirely sure if Fast Eddie's sudden change of licensing is legal, at least in the manner he did so. Generally, changing the license for an entire site that was using one license is no easy changeover, since the contributors must consent to the change and the content must allow for such a changeover.
In this case, it's highly possible what Fast Eddie did may have been illegal under CC, since he did the change without gaining the consent of his userbase, and the operative word in Creative Commons Share Alike Attribution is "Share Alike", which means the content can be redistributed only under the same or similar license.
Wikipedia obtained a special dispensation to dual license their content under the GDFL and CC BY SA, but as far as we know, TV Tropes never obtained a legal go ahead to just up and switch their entire content base from CC BY SA to CC BY NC SA, especially with no prior notice to their contributors.
Due to this, since the legality of what he did is highly questionable, we're trying to avoid any legal hassle ourselves should it turn out the license changeover TV Tropes used was not legally valid, and thus we be tainted by association with content whose legality is uncertain.