How to Stop Commerial Use of Copyleft Materials? 232
An anonymous reader writes "The Guild Wiki, an extremely popular fan-made wiki for documenting the Masssively Multiplayer game Guild Wars, was originally supported by donations, then later advertisements — supposedly just enough to break even. Just the past week, the owner of the domain name surprised this wiki community by revealing that he had sold the domain name, the database, and his services to Wikia, a commercial entity that intends to profit from Guild Wiki's content. The catch? Much of Guild Wiki's content falls under Creative Commons by-nc-sa license, which denies the commercial use of licensed material. Arena.net created their own community run wiki to serve as the in-game help system, because they didn't think they could use the material on Guild Wiki commercially. If Wikia continues to serve ads over Guild Wiki's content, how can the thousands of contributors to the site stop them without going to the expense/trouble of hiring attorneys (or the crude path of mass vandalism)? If it turns out the site owner has been making a profit all along from ads, what's the remedy?"