Forum:MagCloud for CC-NC-SA

The Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share alike license, which is used for GuildWiki and probably other wikia wikis, is - I believe, incompatable with the new MagCloud extension. The purpose of a non-commercial license is that nobody can sell the work. However, MagCloud will make a profit out of the sale of content in this way.

Adverts on pages are, it is generally accepted, an exception to this rule, as they help fund the hosting of the content, whilst, I'm sure, part of the deal with Wikia and MagCloud is that Wikia gets some of the profits, this is not sufficient to break the entire license, and indeed the original terms of the licence. At no point before the deal were editors informed that their content would be sold. Whilst the CC-BY-SA license that most wikia wikis use can be sold in this way, as there is no non-commercial clause, NC-SA must not be used in this way.

Please disable this extension for wikis using a CC-NC-SA license Random Time  08:24, October 23, 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi! Thanks for your post.  With MagCloud, users are paying for the printing rather than the content itself.  In that way, it really isn't much different than if a user paid HP for the printer and the ink that he uses to print the content out himself.  The MagCloud user agreement that all users must accept before publishing to MagCloud states that users may only publish material that they have permission to use; while it is true that it is possible for a user to publish a magazine and make it available for a profit, the user is ultimately responsible for ensuring that he uses content in a way that complies with any applicable copyright and licensing restrictions.  We believe that using MagCloud to create a magazine for one's own personal use complies with the non-commercial clause of a CC-NC license. --KyleH (talk) 23:33, October 23, 2009 (UTC)


 * It doesn't matter whether the charges are for printing or for the content. You're still printing the content, so money is being transferred from one person to another for material that is protected under a non-commercial license. The same goes for magazines that utilize fair use content, which will probably be 90% of the content considering this is for entertainment wikis and virtually all of them, if not all of them, use fair use images. This really is a bad idea. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 02:09, October 24, 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for yet another post (FYI, this doesn’t have to do with CC-BY-NC-SA, but I didn’t want to create another forum topic for copyright issues), but I’ve gone through the full text of Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 Unported, which as you know Wikia is licensed under, and there’s one glaring issue that I’ve found: authors. The magazine thankfully states what the license for the article is, but there doesn’t seem to be anything that states who the original author and any of the subsequent authors of an article were. I’m about to cite the text that says this is required under CC-BY-SA, but let me first just say that I would think a magazine like this constitutes both a collection of the original work and a reproduction as specified in Section 1b and Section 1k of the license, respectively. Now, here is what I was going to cite:


 * If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and (iv), consistent with Ssection [sic]'' 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author").

I don’t believe the original author and/or licensors have designated the wiki itself to receive the attribution, as it must be provided in a copyright notice, terms of service, or other reasonable means. This has not been done, at least from what I’ve seen.

Perhaps there’s something I’ve missed in reading all of that. Perhaps not. Either way, it will need to be addressed. With all of the new features that Wikia has rolled out over the years, whether it be the Monaco skin, blogs, or MyHome, this one will by far be the most controversial because it directly deals with copyright laws.

Now regardless of whether I’m right or wrong about the Creative Commons issues, the fair use issues will still need to be addressed. Most of these magazines, which will involve a monetary transaction, will utilize fair use material, considering they’re being used for entertainment wikis. The fundamental principle of fair use is that you can use a copyrighted work with only like four defenses, and one of them is that it doesn’t infringe on the copyright holder’s ability to profit off of a work. While you may think a magazine about Anakin Skywalker, complete with images of the character, doesn’t infringe upon Lucasfilm’s ability to profit off of the character, the fact that someone else is receiving money by doing something involving that copyrighted material infringes upon Lucasfilm’s ability to make a profit because that money is going to someone other than Lucasfilm.

Of course you can still say that the user needs to be responsible in some sort of disclaimer, but I don’t see that happening. Your target membership group is fairly young. Wikia isn’t exactly attracting lawyers as its main user base. Furthermore, it’s not like every policy on wikis are followed by every user. Some people, sometimes a lot of people, just disregard policies and disclaimers. Will this be any different? Yes you can say that the users are liable, but I believe you would be too. You’re providing the means for these users to print out magazines and sell them to their friends, and/or you’re providing the means for the printers to receive money from these users who are utilizing fair use material.

This whole thing is a lawsuit waiting to happen. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 03:08, October 24, 2009 (UTC)
 * I think the thing that we're all forgetting is that you've paying for a service, not content. The content is still free, but the service costs money. Also, the magazines are sent to your home, not your local retail store. The main issues are attribution, fair use, and adherence and respect to a wiki's chosen license; this isn't a money problem (unless we're being ripped). --Michaeldsuarez (Talk) (Deeds) 03:46, October 24, 2009 (UTC)

It can be a monetary issue in regards to fair use. I'm fairly certain that it doesn't matter whether the monetary transaction is for the content or the service, because the service is being provided for the content. If the content wasn't there, there would be no service. The printer would be getting money based on the service, yes, but they would be getting money based on the service of providing the content. It would be astronomically difficult to defend fair use in a case like this. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 03:54, October 24, 2009 (UTC)


 * About attribution, GFDL wikis like http://fr.guildwars.wikia.com/ are not suitable for MagCloud, because GFDL is more restrictive about attribution, and also needs the FULL copy of the text of the GFDL license in each print, which is something MagCloud is not doing. So, definitively, MagCloud must be disabled on GFDL wikis, or append the full text of the license in those wikis. --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -WikiDex 09:13, October 24, 2009 (UTC)

Ciencia raises a good point, but not just for GFDL. I wasn’t going to say anything since the magazines do state that there is a CC-BY-SA license, but Section 4a of the license does also state that there needs to be a copy of the license or a URL to the license. This magazine provides neither, but rather just says what the license is. This will need to either be corrected, or the magazine will have to be disabled on all Wikia wikis.

Furthermore, I wanted to say another thing about the authors. After being able to zoom in far enough on a test magazine to halfway make out what the bibliography page is saying, I can see that it does say you can see a list of authors by going to a URL that it provides. That said, the license specifically says that you need to “keep intact” the author names. Now I’m not a lawyer, but to me that would pretty much mean you need to provide it. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 14:42, October 24, 2009 (UTC)
 * "(iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work"--AB 16:24, October 26, 2009 (UTC)


 * That's in reference to something completely different. That's not saying you need the author names OR the URL. It's requiring both. The magazine creator provides the URL, but not the author. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 17:27, October 26, 2009 (UTC)

In response to KyleH, the new MagCloud feature is different than buying a printer and using it to print the pages. With the MagCloud feature, Wikia and MagCloud are doing the modifying, and MagCloud is doing the copying and distributing. As demonstrated in 20th Century Fox Film Corp. v. Cablevision Systems Corp. [ link ], when a company provides and maintains an interface to copy copyrighted material, the company is doing the copying, not the users. Also, although I'm not sure about this, I think the Digital Millennium Copyright Act states that website administrators are responsible that users don't upload copyrighted materials so that the website would distribute it. Beep21 01:28, October 25, 2009 (UTC)
 * Because they aren't uploading the website, wikia may have safe harbour unless they know copyright is being broken (That's how YouTube operates, they can't be sued for copyvios they don't know about, but when they here about them, the videos are quickly taken down) - however, you may well be correct about providing an interface Random Time  07:13, October 25, 2009 (UTC)

Even if Wikia had safe harbor in that regard, the printer still wouldn't. Wikia would be an accessory to that, even if they weren't held liable for doing so. At that point it'd come down to moral responsibility to get rid of this program. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 07:21, October 25, 2009 (UTC)

Changes to Magazine Creator
Thanks for all the feedback so far; your notes have been extremely helpful. While we continue to believe that the Magazine Creator tool is compatible with the noncommercial clause of the CC-NC licenses, we understand the frustration that you (especially RandomTime) have expressed regarding the use of the content that you have contributed. For that reason, we are making a couple of changes.

First of all, we are disabling the Magazine Creator tool on all wikis that are not available under the CC-BY-SA license. This means we will be disabling it on all wikis that are licensed under the GFDL, or a CC-NC license. Also, we will be adding the URL of the CC-BY-SA license to the Bibliography section of all magazines created by the Magazine Creator.

We believe that these changes to the Magazine Creator tool will better respect the expectations that the original authors had when they contributed content to noncommercial wikis. Having said that, as I said before, users are still ultimately responsible for ensuring that what they publish (including images) is consistent with fair use or any applicable licensing restrictions. --KyleH (talk) 18:55, October 26, 2009 (UTC)


 * Glad to see you guys disabled it on non-CC-BY-SA wikis. That said, there's still the issue of fair use images. While Wikia may not be liable for any situations, the printer still has to be responsible for those fair use images. I'll reiterate something I said in your blog, Kyle. You can hold the user responsible for insuring that their magazine complies with fair use or other licensing restrictions, depending on what it is, but that doesn't clear the printer of any liability. That printer is still reproducing the fair use image in the product and then charging a user for it. The Magazine Creator is directly receiving money specifically for reproduction of content that has fair use images in it. I'm glad to see you guys acknowledge the fact that there could be potential copyright issues, but I still don't really understand why you'd continue to allow this product to operate on your servers when so many people could get in big trouble over it. Here's my suggestion – does the magazine have to be printed out by the MagCloud company, which costs money? Is there a way there can be some sort of magazine creator where, if a user wanted to print it out, they could do it themselves? There'd be nothing wrong with that, not even a gray area. Also, one more thing – what about a list of the authors? That's very important, and can be easily solved with a direct link to the article's page history. I think that'd be for the best and clear up the remaining Creative Commons issues. - <font color="#1A2BBB">Brandon Rhea <font color="#1A2BBB">(talk) 19:10, October 26, 2009 (UTC)
 * And just for re-emphasis in case it was overlooked, there's also what Beep21 said. Per "20th Century Fox Film Corp. v. Cablevision Systems Corp," a company that provides and maintains an interface to copy copyrighted material is responsible for said copying if there are any legal disputes involved. While this most certainly would seem to apply to the MagCloud company (I'm not quite sure who's operating it; was it HP?), I could stand corrected in regards to the lack of Wikia liability. The "provides and maintains an interface" could mean a number of things, including this Wikia feature. - <font color="#1A2BBB">Brandon Rhea <font color="#1A2BBB">(talk) 19:19, October 26, 2009 (UTC)
 * While I can appreciate the good intentions of the warnings of caution, especially the point that the rights of copyright owners must be respected, I'd like to add a counterpoint to Brandon's excellent notes quoted from Meta's essay on Copyright Paranoia: "Copyright paranoia" is generally a bad thing -- a very bad thing, which causes us to voluntarily abandon our fair use rights before they are even legislated or adjudicated away from us."  This is a perennial issue, and it is important not to lose one's perspective.   23:51, October 26, 2009 (UTC)
 * While MyraPedia does not use content from any tv network or somesuch, many contributors are sensitive to the "making money off it" question, especially thoe artists from elfwood etc who are not involved in the project but allowed us to use their work noncommercially with attribution given. One way out seems to be, from where I stand, to disable the possibility to add to MagClouds service price for any CC-NC-SA wikia. Thus it would be clear that the creator of a mag-from-wikia does not profit financially from the nonprofit work (or the ccopyrighted content) of others. Just my 2cents (€uro-Cents, by the way) --IrasCignavojo 14:25, October 27, 2009 (UTC)

Good point, Phlox, but I just wanted to point out that I'm not really paranoid or anything. =P I'm not going to be using this MagCloud so it doesn't affect me in the slightest. I just want to make sure all of this is cleared up and get an official response from Wikia as to why they believe it's fair use other than just "we believe it's fair use." - <font color="#1A2BBB">Brandon Rhea <font color="#1A2BBB">(talk) 16:45, October 27, 2009 (UTC)