All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part IV

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, here's what I sent through the Kickstarter message function:

My name is Robert M. Schroeck. I am a professional author, a member of SFWA (The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a professional association), I would like to address some issues with the TV Tropes wiki of which you may be unaware.

As of 2012 I was the longest-active member of TV Tropes outside of the administrative staff. Under the handle "Looney Toons", I wrote the original text for nearly 600 individual pages on TV Tropes, including nearly a dozen so-called "tropes of legend", such as Adaptation Decay, Executive Meddling, Genre Blindness and Buffy-Speak. I created the anime section from scratch. I helped set some of the earliest policies of the wiki. However, when I publicly protested Fast Eddie's decision to impose a censorship regime upon TV Tropes in May 2012, I was summarily banned from the wiki and locked out of my account.

I would like to emphasize that at no time during the period where I was actively contributing to the wiki did I ever agree to transfer my copyright on the material I wrote to the Wiki, Fast Eddie, or any other affiliated entity. I accepted the redistribution license -- the initial implied one, and then the later CC BY SA 3.0 license Fast Eddie applied to the site. However, at no time did I cede ownership of my work. Any claims Fast Eddie has made to ownership of the text of those 600 or so pages is not only false but illegal.

I have been in the beginning stages of preparing a lawsuit against TV Tropes for its attempt to unilaterally seize the rights to my work, because Fast Eddie had proven so hostile and recalcitrant over the past two and a half years, because the change in the site's license broke the contract implicit and explicit in the terms of CC BY SA 3.0, and simply because it is illegal to unilaterally claim the ownership of another person's work. I would point you at the case of the Prince George County, MD Board of Education, which in early 2013 attempted to claim by fiat ownership of the copyrights to all creative work by their teachers *and* students. They were quickly disabused of the notion that they could legally do so. Fast Eddie's attempt to fraudulently claim ownership of all material written for the TV Tropes wiki -- while publicly claiming that the material is merely licensed to the wiki -- is equally invalid, and I was prepared to take him to court to purge my work and all derivatives thereof from TV Tropes.

I would like to know what you plan to do about the illegal rights grab made by Fast Eddie and how you plan to address it in your "new" TV Tropes. Let me emphasize that I am not seeking to deprive you of the pages I wrote; I simply want my copyrights respected and acknowledged (and similarly, the copyrights of all other contributors similarly respected and acknowledged). If you do that, neither I nor the Berne Convention will have a quarrel with you.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.