Web Stuff WikiMedia Sues Internet Brands

[Robby]

WikiMedia has filed a lawsuit against Internet Brands, the current owner of vBulletin. The lawsuit is to a counter a lawsuit that Internet Brands has filed against volunteers who help to run WikiTravel, a site that Internet Brands owns.

WikiTravel started out in 2003 as a privately owned wiki site dedicated to travelers. It gained a following because it allowed lesser-known travel destinations to be covered that the larger travel sites typically wouldn't even mention. As with most wiki sites the content is user generated and covered under a Creative Commons license. In 2006 the site was purchased by Internet Brands. As part of the purchase Internet Brands made promises to the users that the users feel have not been delivered upon. Among the promises were using the vast Internet Brands resources to devote more development to WikiTravel to help it grow. Instead the users claim that Internet Brands has been mostly an absentee landlord who has let the site go stagnant.

Earlier this year WikiMedia started a discussion as to whether they themselves should start up a travel wiki. The outcome was that WikiMedia would indeed be creating their own travel wiki fully supported by the WikiMedia organization. The users of WikiTravel voted to migrate to the new WikiMedia site. Since the content of WikiTravel is user generated under a CCL it could be copied to the new WikiMedia site. WikiVoyage, another wiki site devoted to travlers, also voted to migrate to the new WikiMedia site.

In response to the actions voted on by the users of WikiTravel, Internet Brands filed a lawsuit against two of their own volunteer administrators for "civil conspiracy" and said that they will be including other users in time. WikiMedia responded by filing their own lawsuit against Internet Brands seeking a judicial ruling that Internet Brands has no right to interfere with the creation of a new competing travel wiki.

Reading

• WikiMedia blog announcing their lawsuit against Internet Brands
• PDF of the WikiMedia filing against Internet Brands
• Public post by a former WikiTravel admin giving a more detailed history into the decision to migrate to WikiMedia
• UPDATE: PDF of the Internet Brands filing against their volunteers
• UPDATE 2: New York Times article about the lawsuit

 

[Kevin]

The lawsuit has caught the attention of some in the XenForo community since the Internet Brands lawsuit against the individuals who formerly worked for them has similarities to the Internet Brands lawsuits against the the XenForo creators.

We do not feel it is appropriate for Internet Brands, a large corporation with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, to seek to intimidate two individuals.

A legal fight between WikiMedia & Internet Brands could have a vastly different outcome versus the legal fight between XenForo & Internet Brands since WikiMedia has the resources to put up an even legal fight against Internet Brands.

Internet Brands has gained a reputation for trying to bury potential competitors in legal fights where the competitors often can't afford to fight back. This time they may have picked a fight with somebody who can not only fight back but give Internet Brands quite a bruising.

 

[Kevin]

Somebody submitted it to Slashdot...

Internet Brands Sues People For Forking Under CC BY-SA - Slashdot

... and some of the replies give more information into what the lawsuit alleges. In a nutshell, supposedly IB acknowledges that the content itself can be copied to the new site but the volunteers (again, supposedly) made public statements that WikiTravel was moving to WikiMedia and that they also emailed several hundred WikiTravel users from their WikiTravel email accounts saying the same thing. The problem there would be that WikiTravel is not moving to WikiMedia and it will remain a for-profit site by IB; the users can move away if they want to but saying that WikiTravel is moving to WikiMedia would be a false statement.