The site is very nicely coming along.

However, I worry about its future. There's all kinds of content on that site that is attributed to a wide variety of people - it's certainly not public domain - look at all the pictures and the copyrights reserved, and there's no clear policy regarding the submission of content and who owns it or what is "legal use". At some point in time, whoever is running that site can take it down just like the pinrepair.com site, pinwiki will be mired in controversy, but in the case of Pinwiki, people will actually have a legitimate beef because that site IS created by a bunch of people, whereas Pinrepair.com was the result of one central editor who wrote 99.9% of the content and actually has legitimate rights to it. So, while Pinwiki is nice... it's not like Wikipedia where submissions are supposed to be public domain or specific types of unrestricted licenses.

I am not sure what's going to happen in the future with Pinwiki... what happens when someone takes some of the content and tries to republish it? What happens when the web host guy decides hes tired of paying for the hosting and brings the web site down or monetizes it? What happens when people in the community start fighting over who "owns" what parts of it? It's something to think about.

Who and what is PinWiki.com? You can't even do a WHOIS on the domain. The owner of the domain is anonymous. So basically whoever owns that domain has rights to the content.

Anyone who mirrors the site under a different domain name does not have any rights to display the content according to their legalese.

I like the idea of PinWiki but the execution is poor. It looks like Wikipedia but looks can be deceiving. Whoever owns the domain has non-transferrable rights to use other peoples' work. And you probably can't fix this error without starting the whole venture over from scratch.

Also this is ambiguous: "the author grants PinWiki.com an irrevocable license to display that material"

That could be construed any number of ways. What is "to display that material" mean? Can they take other peoples' work and publish a book and sell it for their own profit as long as the book is owned by "PinWiki.com?" There's nothing in the licensing restricting the owners of PinWiki.com from at any time, putting up a paywall like Clay did and restricting access to the info they contributed.

The proper way to do PinWiki would be to require public domain or creative commons rights on any submitted material.

What's ironic is this was created in the wake of the pinrepair.com guides taken offline, and people wanted a resource that couldn't be taken down, but Pinwiki is even less stable than Pinrepair. They could have simply put in the terms, "This content is intended to be made available on the Internet, without restriction, free of charge in perpetuity." or even added "the author grants PinWiki.com AND ANY MIRROR SITES an irrevocable license to publish that material online."

There are so many ways the terms of the site could have been easily spelled out to make the resource a truly protected resource for the community, but it wasn't done. So now this community resource everyone has been contributed to, is controlled by whoever owns the domain PinWiki.com.

That's one advantage. The other advantage of a Wiki is that the content is PUBLIC DOMAIN or liberally-licensed so that it can be used (with attrition) by others. PinWiki does not have that advantage.

In the open source community, these ideals work because there are specific terms: if you contribute to an open source project, you must agree that your contribution is also open source. EXCEPT in the case of PinWiki, the content is not "open source". The authors maintain a wide variety of ambiguous and restrictive rights to the content, and only the domain name "PinWiki.com" can do anything with it.

I think it's wonderful that the resource is out there. I'm just saying, it's not structured like Wikipedia. It's not 'open source'. It's not 'public domain'. And legally-speaking, it could disappear from the net at any time and nobody could do anything about it. And if a mirror site popped up under another domain name, they wouldn't necessarily have the legal right to use the same content since the terms of service of PinWiki.com don't allow for it.

Right now, it's not an issue because there's not a ton of content on the site, but as more and more content grows, this will become more of an issue. And whoever owns PinWiki.com will have control of that content. Everyone else who contributes will simply have rights to their piecemeal parts. Does anyone see what I mean when I say it as platform isn't that stable? It's still controlled by whoever controls the domain.

I'm suggesting, if the PinWiki people really have good intentions, what they need to do is change the terms of service and licensing restrictions to be public domain and/or Creative Commons public licensing, meaning all content must be contributed in the spirit of open source. None of this barrage of pictures with "copyright xxx" on them.

The problem is, all the existing content has been contributed under more restrictive terms. They either need to revamp all that, or someone should start a new Wiki site that uses the same licensing arrangements as Wikipedia. This is the *only* way to ensure that the content will be freely available on the Internet.

Now if these peoples' intentions are less than honorable, it's a brilliant plan: They offer the web site, they collect all the information, then at some point in the future they put up a paywall, or they decide to publish the information as a book *for their own personal profit* and nobody can do anything about it. If you contribute content to the site, you gave them the rights to use your work. Nowhere does it say they can't charge for it. Nowhere does it say that information has to be made freely available. There is this premise that there will be mirror sites, but it's irrelevant because according to the terms, only one site has rights to "display" the content.

In Contrast, I run my own web site, PinballHelp.com. Which has repair videos and information. I create all the content myself; I write everything; I shoot my own video; I take my own pictures. I offer the info free to the community. But it's still my content. I can do what I want with it at any time. PinWiki is the same kind of deal except they're taking other peoples' content and I think a lot of the contributors may not be aware of it.

I'm not trying to diss those guys for what they're doing. It's just not "open source." It's just as closed a system as my own, Clay's or anybody elses. But the difference is, me and Clay are creating our own content. We're not inviting other people to put stuff on our web site that we are claiming rights to. Something about that just doesn't sit right with me.

I have plenty of content and information I'd like to contribute to such a project, but I am not comfortable with the terms. I don't like the idea that if I post something on the site, I'm not guaranteeing it's available to the community; I'm simply granting "PinWiki.com" the ability to do what they want with it. As a result, I'd rather just host my own content that way I can be sure it will stay up.

I never said my level of expertise is near to Clay. I just said we both are creating our own content.

Why are people trying to attack me personally because I'm pointing out something that is important for the health of the overall pinball community?

I don't think that's the problem. IANAL but I would speculate that PinWiki's reference to Gottlieb and other materials would fall under "Fair Use" guidelines, which allow for references for educational purposes.

The problem is, all material contributed to the site is owned by "PinWiki.com", not the community.

I can see you've contributed a lot to the site Chris, and I certainly appreciate it as I'm sure everybody else does. Maybe it's because half my family are lawyers or LEO and I've been involved in a variety of dealings on issues of this nature, but it just seems to me, that the terms on the site could be cleaned up a lot and it would instantly eradicate any concerns.

Ultimately, since you've done so much for the site, if you're cool with things, then it's not that much of an issue. I certainly really enjoy how much you've put into it and I hope the resource stays around much longer.

Yea, I think some of the posts above were edited after I read them and I missed certain points.

Anyway, I expressed what my concerns were, and it's really exclusively based on my desire to see this community resource stay around, be enjoyed by everybody, and not have any contributors be confused about what rights they're giving to their content.

I apologize if I'm being unnecessarily pessimistic -- if major contributors like Chris are cool with things, so be it. Lately I've been up to my ears in various legal agreements with certain entities so I tend to carefully scrutinize things like this and play devil's advocate.

Dude, like i said. If you have a problem with me, take it up with me. Don't post inflammatory things in public and make bogus accusations against me.

And speaking of threats, I didn't make a threat, but you just did.

This all seems to have started because I had the audacity to suggest that posting a CL ad wasn't that great of a thing to do, and you got your feelings all bent out of shape and have been following me around online trying to mount various personal attacks. You need to grow up and recognize that other people are entitled to have opinions. And if you have a beef with me, take it up with me instead of polluting the forum with your irrational, unjustified malice towards someone you've never met, who has never done anything to you. Grow up!

I'm really sorry people have to see this immature stuff.

I've reported it to the mods. Hopefully they'll deal with it.

It's a sad day when people can't have an exchange of opinion and information without it degenerating into an elementary school-style argument.

One of the reasons many of us have migrated to pinside from other online forums is to escape the nasty witch-hunts that seems to ensue from immature people being upset that someone disagrees with their point of view. I hope Pinside isn't falling pray to this syndrome as well.

Obviously there are lots of resources online for people to get help. Clay has a bunch of his guides up. I don't think he intends to pull them from the net, he's just been going over everything to avoid any more claims about having unauthorized content.

As for my stuff, I never claimed to be in Clay's league or anyone else's. In fact if you visit my site, you'll see I clearly credit a number of other people and sites. I think this is basically the way it is everywhere. We are all grateful to every resource that's online. And PinWiki is another really nice resource. I especially like some of the way the information there is formatted. I hope it stays around.

I still consider my informational videos to be somewhat "amateur" - I never meant for them to be any type of professional advice, and I've said that since day one. My stuff is more of a, "Let's watch as this guy tries to fix his machine." What I really wanted to do more than anything else is give complete chronicles of all the trials of getting a machine working, so my videos often start right after I've unloaded a new game from my truck, and along the way as I figure out how things work.

With my work, usually by the time I finish a video, I'm like, "Wow, I could have done that much better..." and there's not a single video I've shot where I didn't want to erase it and start over, but I also realize that if I staged everything, I'd not get anything done and there'd be nothing up, so if even one person appreciates the stuff I've uploaded, I'm grateful. And in almost every video I usually talk about how I look at Clay's guide or PinWiki or ask questions online... that's the nature of how it's done. All these resources are great.

I haven't checked lately because I have them printed out from a long time ago... I didn't check to see what was up and what wasn't. But it doesn't hurt to drop some money to the cause at http://pinrepair.com/donate/ You never know what you might find.

I get the impression the more people dis him in public, the less motivated he is to put more guides up (but this is just my opinion, I do NOT speak for him and have no idea what his plans are), but I am grateful for what he's done and since he's always been a good guy to me. I believe his critics are a minority and we all want those guides back online for the rest of the community to enjoy. Showing a token by going to the donate page probably also helps.