Most people around these parts know about Gracenote paywalling CDDB, which was the catalyst for several music data projects, one of which became MusicBrainz.
But I’m interested in whether anyone know of other examples of a project/site with publicly available user submitted data gets closed off (e.g., paywalled) after a while?
Not really pay walled but for something bought and shut down is freebase
When this was shut down google did the right thing and gave plenty of warning and continued to provide database dumps.
You can download the full database now from google as well as archive.org
Dumps of this database do exist and much of this data has been imported in to wikidata so it still continues.
Yeah, not exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, since Freebase did get “handed off” decently, and its data is still available (and is aimed to continue to be available via Wikidata).