You actually have a point here. The only reference to authors releasing their works under the share-alike license is buried within the licensing guide. Users aren't required to acknowledge this license whenever they post an article, which may open SCP up to some legal problems should someone decide to claim their articles as their own IP
Reminder that in order for a member of staff to be promoted past the Junior staff phase, a majority of active staff have to vote on it. These people voted Kaktus into his position, knowing that there was a good chance he would be dicks to people, then got pissed when he did the Internet equivalent of pouring water on a grease fire and created a giant pile of extra work for them. Should have voted for competent people.
I wonder if this could provide a precedent for users to actually win retroactive rights to their articles, kind of like how Facebook was taken to court for knowingly building their TOS and user agreements so that people wouldn't read them, then get stuck in them. SCP knows a bunch of teenagers probably aren't going to read a licensing guide, even though it has the vital piece of info that says "Congratulations, your hard work is officially ours now, and not yours."
The admin staff of Wikidot were themselves unsure what the CC BY-SA 3.0 statement meant. Some thought it was just for the code so that things like widgets could be shared and improved upon. There was a whole other debate for the page’s actual content. This was in 2010.
And now there’s no moral argument for the authors to fall back on.
You can write your gay spooky stories in the Art & Literature forum here if you want to.
It's better practice to have a clickthrough where you have to click a box
Most precedents about clickthrough style licenses generally require you at least be aware that the license exist and somehow affirmatively agree to it. Generally if you do so you are bound by its terms barring some doctrine like unconscionability.
I can tell you for a fact that I never agreed to it. The password for the site was painfully easy to find when I originally joined the site, and I never had a reason to go back on my own time to read the licensing guide. I doubt anyone's actually read it completely, and personally I think staff know that.
Of course, if the ss said “you don’t own anything you write” it might turn people off from joining. They take people for granted because words mean more than people for them.
Goddammit, why did this have to be written by one of the few prolific authors that are actually good?
This is my point. They can't just release your works under a license for you with no agreement when joining the site, or even any real clear acknowledgement that you're releasing your shit under CC when you post.
Goddammit, why did this have to be written by one of the few prolific authors that are actually good?
What articles of theirs did you read that gave you that impression? Because as someone who's read all their articles I can tell you that isn't the case at all.
I mistook this for the guy who wrote the sentient runescape NPC and the kid stuck in a bathroom.
Videogame SCPs are on the same level as Sonic.exe
Not that it was ever about legal standing. Nothing in their CC prevents the owners/admins from deleting anything nor everything, by whim or request.
It's almost like it was a bad idea to host a writing project on a wiki farm that was never meant for that kind of thing. The way the license interacts with Wikidot's design is bizarre and creates a lot of issues, but those issues matter less when it's an actual wiki, and not a creepypasta website pretending to be a wiki.
