[the_logos]

This is pretty interesting. It seems that the guy that ran The Guild Wiki - - (ranked around #3200 on Alexa) ran it under a Creative Commons license, which denies the commercial use of copyrighted material. He's turned around and sold the domain and the wiki to Wikia, who intend to run ads on it. Slashdot story here:

Now, Wikia intends to run ads on this, in apparent violation of the Creative Commons license that The Guild Wiki was built under (essentially defrauding all the contributors to The Guild Wiki to some people's eyes), which completely prohibits use of the content in any commercial activity (and it's a far far better-written license with far fewer gaping holes than, say, the DIKU license is). Even Arena.net (the creators of Guild Wars) decided that they were unable to use The Guild Wiki as a source of in-game documentation because that would be using it for a commercial purpose, and that's not prohibited.

Interesting stuff in any case and serves to underline how complicated license issues can be. In any case, I'm going to keep an eye on this personally. Wikia needs to take some honest action here or it risks alienating potential contributors (not that we matter much in the grand scheme of things but I know Iron Realms won't be considering the use of Wikia until we're satisfied that they're going to respect people's IP rights).

--matt