Due to recent events, site staff has been discussing adding a content license to the site.
The content license would generally cover the user generated text content, along with content created on this site (This is just a generalization for now). All external images and video content shown within this site are the copyright of their respective owners.
The license brought up that looks to be most applicable to our situation is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical 4.0 International
Please read: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Having a license on the data still allows the site to do the following: 1: speedrun.com reserves the right to change the licensing of the data at any point. 2: speedrun.com reserves the right to issue other specific licenses to certain sites at its discretion. (If a site has ads, it needs our permission, which would be granted in some cases.)
It is wholly necessary to add some sort of license at this point to clarify the current ambiguity and establish expectations. We acknowledge that we're adding a license later than preferable, and site staff can work to accommodate individual concerns.
Site staff wishes to allows individual users to retain a sensible level of personal use ability for their self-created content on the site. How exactly this is expressed in the terms is to be determined.
I am not a lawyer, and I am still learning about the nuances of this.
Question, comments, concerns?
I think the main problem with what TG did copying all the rulesets and categories from this site to theirs is that they didn't even bother asking us if they could. Especially since TG has a long history of shitting on the speedrunning community.
Would we really have a problem with another site using community rulesets and categories under their own verification system?
The head of TG makes a lot of good point in this thread. http://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/144637-Article-Speedruns
Are rulesets for a game really something we want to have a monopoly on? Do we not allow people to speedrun under the rules here if they don't want to post to this site?
I think that other content like guides and such should be protected, but not rules and categories.
It's really not monopolizing the ruleset, it's restricting wholesale copying of user generated content. No one is advocating restricting the way of playing the game (it isn't really even possible or practical to do that), just protecting the text available through the API for the exact particular way it's described herein.
"Don't copy the rules verbatim without following our content restrictions" and "Don't play by the same rules" are two extremely different ideas.
Also I don't foresee anyone caring about rulesets or categories for a single game being copied under the system, it's mostly to restrict against repackaging the whole site content. If we really need official language to establish this, we can look into it.
By either writing their own rules describing the same way of playing the game, or by following the content agreement to use our site's user generated verbatim wording. This seems relatively straightforward.
Again, it's mostly to restrict against repackaging the whole site content, which currently lacks sufficient protection.
But they can post them on their own website. The problem is that everything was literally copy-pasted onto TG. If they had written out their own rules (which can or cannot coincide with the ones used for speedruns on speedrun.com) then that's perfectly fine.
Note that TG could just copy-paste guides and resources over to their website as well, without giving proper credit to the authors. We want to prevent that from happening. This doesn't mean that TG can't feature any kind of guide on its website, but it shouldn't just copy the exact thing from elsewhere without permission.
This doesn't prevent anybody from using the same rules on their site; anybody who has written a term paper knows it's possible to copy something without using copy & paste.
I think licensing the site is a good idea.
Are we really going to force other places to hand write tens of thousands of categories and rules for each one that took thousands of users to make just because we don't want them copied word for word? When essentially they can be hand written the exact same way?
I'm all for guides and content like that to be protected. I just have a problem with other members of the speedrunning community not having reign to use publicly posted categories and rules easily. Which is what this site is for, easy access to public information, like categories, rules, and information on fastest times.
We encourage external sites to integrate with us and use our data. That's why I've built the REST API over the last few months. All we ask for in return is that those users give credit. Really, a small link to us will probably be sufficient. That is not much to ask.
Without a license on our site, external sites must assume that they are not allowed to use the data at all. Just because we don't have a license does not mean our data is automatically public domain. We therefore need the license to enable others to safely use our stuff.
Without a license they can assume fair use rights. Which would allow a number of integrations, but not copying and pasting onto their own sites.
Though I'm not arguing against a license (and I think the license i n the OP is fine).