semanticdrifter response

semanticdrifter, Oct 19 05:53 pm (UTC):
Cam,

Thanks for contacting Wikia. I have to start by making sure you understand that Wikia is not in a position to offer legal advice. While we do have some experience with CC-BY-SA licensing and general copyright and I am happy to offer some insights, I am not an attorney, and I am certainly not your attorney.

[End of Disclaimer]

Reading through the statement from Jagex that you linked to, it seems that they are largely correct. As stated on our licensing page (http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Community_Central:Licensing), "Non-text media on Wikia should not be assumed to be available under the same license as the text. Please view the media description page for details about the license of any specific media file." Images don't automatically fall under CC-BY-SA, and even if they did screenshots and other images that Jagex owns the underlying copyright to are fair game. They almost certainly qualify as a fair use under copyright law, so you are free to use them but you have no right or ability to stop anyone else from doing so.

As to their text content policy, they require a DMCA takedown notice before they will take action. This makes perfect sense and Wikia operates the same way. It sounds like you accept this, but are worried about finding the original authors and getting them to send the DMCA notice. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to get authorization to act as the third party. While a DMCA notice can come from the copyright holder's agent, there does have to be permission before anyone can act on their behalf.

The form of that permission, such as whether it has to be explicit or you can get away with saying "If you don't want me to act as your agent please opt out by responding on my talk page", is not something I am in a position to advise on.

However, the notice does not have to come from the first author of any given article. Whoever had made the most recent edit should be in a position to send the notification. You might even be able to make a few minor edits on a page yourself, and then for DMCA purposes you would be the author of the current version.

Furthermore, the point of the DMCA notification process is that ISPs don't have to do any legwork when they come in. I can't speak for Jagex in particular, but in general when a DMCA notice is received the content is usually automatically taken down with a minimum of investigation.

Hope this helps,

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Sean McGilvray
Wikia Community Support