Copyright FAQ
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
What is copyright?
- Copyright is the right that the producer of a creative work has been granted to prevent others from copying it. Unlike a patent, in most places (i.e., countries) you don't have to apply for a copyright – you get one automatically every time you produce creative work.
- A creative work can be almost anything – a book, a song, a picture, a photograph, a poem, a phrase, or a fictional character.
- Licenses may be granted to others, giving them the right to copy the work subject to certain conditions. A license is similar to a contract – the work may only be copied under the conditions given by the copyright holder or if one of the other exceptions to the copy right applies.
- Copyright laws vary between countries; the relevant US law is Title 17. The Berne Convention is a comprehensive international agreement on copyrights which is part of the copyright law of many nations.
- Copyright does not protect against all possible copying: both US law and the Berne Convention limit copyright scope and enable much copying without permission even if the copyright holder objects. In the US, fair use (in the UK, fair dealing) is explicitly permitted as well, as is the right to sell a licensed copy of a copyrighted work, such as a video tape or sound recording. Both the Berne Convention and US law require that a work have some original creativity to be eligible for a copyright monopoly.
- Copyright is limited to expressions, not ideas. Thus, a book by Agatha Christie is likely to be copyrighted, but the idea of a detective with an accent and odd personal mannerisms would not be, nor would a story about someone claiming to be the premier consulting detective in a major city be a violation of the Conan Doyle copyrights on Sherlock Holmes stories.
What should I do if I find a copyright violation on Wikipedia?
- If you are the copyright holder, go to Wikipedia:Request for immediate removal of copyright violation; otherwise, go to Wikipedia:Copyright problems and report the instance in question.
Can I add something to Wikipedia that I got from somewhere else?
- Only text that is licensed compatibly with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0), or in the public domain, can be copied onto Wikipedia. If copyright of the previously published text belongs exclusively to you, it must also be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to comply with our Terms of Use. An incomplete table of licenses compatible or not with Wikipedia is shown below. Inputs of Creative Commons licensed text require attribution; point to the source in your edit summary and, if necessary, with attribution on the article's face using {{CC-notice}}.
License Compatibility with Wikipedia [note 1] | |
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Licenses compatible with Wikipedia | Licenses not compatible with Wikipedia |
Creative Commons Licenses | |
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Other Licenses | |
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- ^ For text only; Please see Wikipedia:File_copyright_tags for licences allowed with files
- The absence of a copyright notice does not mean that a work may be freely used. If in doubt, you cannot use it.
- If the material you would like to use is not licensed compatibly with Wikipedia, you may be able to obtain permission to use it. See Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission for details.
- More licenses are permitted for images. See Wikipedia:File copyright tags for some of the licenses permitted as well as an explanation of what criteria the license must meet.
- Under very narrow circumstances, copyrighted images and text can be used with attribution under the "fair use" clause of US copyright law. Limited use of copyrighted text, for example, can be done without requiring permission from the rights holders for such things as scholarship and review. See Wikipedia:Non-free content and below for more information on when and how copyrighted text and images can be used on Wikipedia.
- Unless copyrighted images and text meet Wikipedia's non-free content allowance, we can't use them or create "derivative works" of them. That means we can't translate too much from a copyrighted foreign language source to include it here or prominently feature a copyrighted image inside of a picture we take. (See below for more explanation of derivative works.)
- Facts cannot be copyrighted. It is legal to read a work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Wikipedia. Be careful not to closely paraphrase. The structure, presentation, and phrasing of the information should be your own original creation.
- Data that is not subject to copyright may be, and indeed often should be, copied verbatim. Examples are parsed and translated example sentences in linguistics, orbital and physical parameters in astronomy, and lists of member species and their interrelationships in biological classifications. Paraphrasing or other alteration in such cases is inappropriate original research because doing so will change the data and thus invalidate it.
Can I use an image from someone else's Wikipedia article in my article?
- If the image is tagged as Fair use, then you cannot. See the Fair use section for more details.
- You can for all other images released under a free license provided you abide by the license conditions.
Can I reuse Wikipedia's content somewhere else?
- Wikipedia's text is copyrighted, but you may reuse it under the terms of our licensing requirements.
- Most text in Wikipedia, excluding quotations, is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and can therefore be reused only if you release any derived work under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License or the GFDL. This requires that, among other things, you attribute the authors and allow others to freely copy your work.
- If you are unwilling or unable to use the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License or the GNU Free Documentation License for your work, you cannot use Wikipedia content. Small quotations of Wikipedia content, with its source attributed, may be permissible under fair use.
- No permission is needed to create a hyperlink to Wikipedia or its articles.
- Images used in Wikipedia may have their own, completely independent licensing scheme. Looking at an image's description page by clicking on the image itself should tell you the copyright status of the image. Many images are either in the public domain or licensed under copyleft licenses, but some are copyrighted and used on Wikipedia under fair use. Fair use images on Wikipedia often cannot be reused elsewhere.
What is the public domain?
- A work which is not copyrighted is in the public domain, and may be freely copied by anyone. It may have been placed in the public domain by its creator, it may be ineligible for copyright (not original enough or otherwise excluded), or the copyright may have expired.
- All work produced by employees of the US federal government as part of their work is public domain within the US. However, the government frequently includes works on its websites which are copyrighted by someone else, and the US government can even own copyright on works which are produced by others. Some US Federal websites can include works which are not in the public domain—check the copyright status before assuming something is public domain. Note also that this applies only to the US Federal government. Most state governments retain the copyright on their work (California and Florida being notable exceptions).
- Works produced by the UK government are not public domain; they are covered by Crown copyright.
- Something on the Internet without a copyright notice does not mean that it is in the public domain.
- If public domain work is included in a copyrighted product, the new product is not public domain. The portions of the new copyrighted work that are from a public domain source may be removed and copied without permission. For example when a public domain text is included in a Wikipedia article any additional text or new creative elements are still under CC-BY-SA and the GFDL.
What is a derivative work?
- A derivative work is something that is "based on or derived from" another work. For example, the first Star Wars novelization is a derivative work of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Del Rey Books required Lucasfilm's permission to publish and distribute the book. The French translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is a derivative of the English novel. Translator Jean-François Ménard required the permission of J. K. Rowling's agent, Christopher Little Literary Agency, to prepare, publish and distribute it.
- You may not distribute a derivative work of a work under copyright without the original author's permission unless your use of their content meets fair use or fair dealing. (A summary (or analysis) of something is not a derivative work, unless it reproduces the original in great detail, at which point it becomes an abridgment and not a summary.)
- Pictures of copyrighted buildings are not considered derivative works, unless the country it is photographed in does not have freedom of panorama provisions (such as France or Italy). In United States copyright law, "The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work – but only if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place."[1] As such, freely-licensed photos of copyrighted buildings (but not photos of copyrighted artwork attached to buildings) generally can be hosted on the English Wikipedia regardless of where the photo was taken. See Wikipedia:Freedom of panorama and the {{FoP-USonly}} licensing tag.
What is fair use?
- Under certain conditions, you may copy a copyrighted work without a license from the original author. One of these limitations on the rights granted to the copyright holder is called "fair use." A more restricted version called fair dealing generally applies outside the United States.
- Quotations are widely considered fair use and fair dealing and are explicitly allowed under the Berne Convention.
- Fair use exceptions are ill-defined, and vary widely from country to country. What is fair use in one country may not be in another country.
Wikipedia and fair use
- Because the database servers are located in the United States, Wikipedia is subject to US copyright law in this matter and may not host material which infringes US copyright law. Wikipedia:Non-free content is a page offering more specific guidance about what is likely to be fair use in the Wikipedia articles and what Wikipedia policy will accept. In general, the educational and transformative nature of Wikipedia articles provides an excellent fair use case for anyone reproducing an article.
What is a license?
- A license is a permission to use a work in the way described by the license. A single work can have as many licenses as the creator decides are useful.
- It's very common for a copyright holder to provide licenses tailored to the needs of an individual large business customer; it's much less so for individual, and small business customers. Typically, individuals will use one of the following boilerplates:
Non-commercial licenses
- There are many different kinds of non-commercial licenses, but generally they say something like You may use, copy, or distribute this work for non-commercial purposes.
- Wikipedia prohibits the use of works licensed with a non-commercial license. They may still be used under the terms of fair use in Wikipedia.
Educational licenses
- It is very common for scientific works to allow educational use. What each publisher considers to be educational varies. Some consider only schools and colleges to be educational, others include all forms of public education, including encyclopedias, to be educational.
- Wikipedia prohibits the use of works licensed with an educational license. They may still be used under the terms of fair use.
Permissive licenses
- Permissive licenses allow for unrestricted use, modification, and distribution of a copyrighted work. The modified BSD license, the X11 license, and the MIT license are each examples of permissive licenses. These licenses seek to make it as easy as possible to reuse the licensed work: the objective is generally to make the work available and as widely used as possible, but without releasing it to the public domain. Those using permissively licensed works can relicense derivative work under more restrictive license terms.
- Wikipedia allows the use of works licensed with a permissive license.
Attribution licenses
- An attribution license is a permissive license with an additional requirement of attribution of previous authors' works in any derivative work. An attribution licenses says (essentially): "You may use, copy, or distribute this work, as long as you give credit to the original author." The original "four clause" BSD license is an example of an attribution license.
- Wikipedia allows the use of works licensed with an attribution license.
Copyleft licenses
- Some licenses are called "copyleft" licenses. Essentially, they have three key properties:
- A work licensed with a copyleft license can be copied at will.
- All published derivative works must use exactly the same license as the original: if you use the work, you're forced to use the same license for your own original work as well.
- If your work is using a different license, you can't use the copyleft license, even if your work is also using a (different) copyleft licence.
- Wikipedia allows the use of works licensed with a copyleft license.
Creative Commons licenses
- "Creative Commons License" (CCL) may refer to one of several licenses written by Creative Commons (founded by Lawrence Lessig). Most of the CCLs fall under one of the categories mentioned above:
- CC BY licenses are attribution licenses.
- CC BY-SA licenses are copyleft licenses.
- CC BY-NC licenses are non-commercial licenses.
- CC BY-ND licenses prohibit someone from distributing derivative works of a CC BY-ND licensed work. Wikipedia prohibits the use of works licensed with CC BY-ND. They may still be used under the terms of fair use in Wikipedia.
- Some of the deprecated licences still apply full copyright to people in developed countries (Developing Nations Licence), or don't permit distribution of the whole work (Sampling Licence). Wikipedia prohibits the use of works licensed with these licenses. They may still be used under the terms of fair use in Wikipedia.
GFDL
- The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) is a copyleft license produced by the Free Software Foundation.
- Most of the text on Wikipedia is licensed under GFDL.
- Wikipedia allows the use of works licensed with GFDL.
Typical commercial licenses
- A typical commercial license is written to prohibit redistribution and limit the rights of the licensee as far as practical while still allowing them to make some use of the work. While any license is better than no license, these are often very restrictive.
- Wikipedia prohibits the use of works licensed with a typical commercial license. They may still be used under the terms of fair use in Wikipedia.
Footnotes
- ^ Mary Cullen Yeager and Katherine A. Golden LLP: Owner vs. Architect: Who Owns the Design?