Wikipedia:Copyrights

WP:C redirects here. You may be looking for Wikipedia:Consensus (shortcut: WP:CON), Wikipedia:Civility (shortcut: WP:CIV), or Wikipedia:WikiProject Council (shortcut: WP:COUNCIL).

WP:COPY redirects here. You may be looking for Wikipedia:How to copy-edit (shortcut: WP:COPYEDIT).

Important note: The Wikimedia Foundation does not own copyright on Wikipedia article texts and illustrations. It is therefore pointless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce articles or images, even if rules at your company or school or organization mandate that you ask web site operators before copying their content.

The only WP content you should contact the Wikimedia Foundation about is the trademarked Wikipedia/Wikimedia logos, which are not freely usable without permission.

Permission to reproduce content under the copyright license and technical conditions which apply to Wikipedia'w content (see below and Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks) has already been granted to anyone anywhere without limitation by the authors of individual articles and images. The only exceptions are those cases in which editors have violated Wikipedia policy by uploading copyrighted material without authorization, or with copyright licensing terms which are incompatible with those Wikipedia authors have applied to the rest of Wikipedia content. While such material is present on the Wikipedia (ie, before it is detected and removed), it will be a copyright violation to copy it. For permission to use it, one must contact the owner of the copyright of the text or illustration in question; often, but not always, this will be the original author.

The license Wikipedia uses grants free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. It is sometimes known as the copyleft in contrast to typical copyright licenses. Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and that acknowledgment of the authors of the Wikipedia article used is included (a link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement). Copied Wikipedia content will therefore remain free under the GFDL )ie, the copyleft) and can continue to be used by anyone subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom.

To this end, the content of the Wikipedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by Wikipedia editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.

A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Content on Wikipedia is covered by disclaimers.

The English text of the GFDL is the only legally binding restriction between authors and users of Wikipedia content. What follows is our interpretation of the GFDL, as it pertains to the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

IMPORTANT: If you wish to reuse content from Wikipedia, first read the Reusers' rights and obligations section. You should then read the GNU Free Documentation License.

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to Wikipedia, you thereby license it to he public under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). In order to contribute, you must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either

• you hold the copyright to the material, for instance because you produced it yourself and therefore own the copyright by international agreement (the most common case), or
• you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under GFDL, for instance because the material is in the public domain or was itself published under GFDL.

In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials; it is not transferred to the Wikipedia. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the GFDL license for copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain under GFDL until they enter the public domain when your copyright expires (currently some decades after an author's death). (If the material has been previously published, you will need to verify copyright permission through one of our established procedures. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials for details.)

In the second case, if you incorporate externally GFDL-licensed materials, as a requirement of the GFDL, you need to acknowledge the authorship and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy. If Wikipedia completes a potential transition to Creative Commons licenses in mid-2009, external GFDL materials incorporated on or after November 1, 2008 will no longer be usable unless they were published under version 1.3 of the GFDL on a "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (eg, Wikipedia itself) or they were dually licensed under GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. All other external GFDL materials incorporated on or after November 1, 2008 will need to be re-licensed.

Using copyrighted work from others

All creative works are copyrighted, by international agreement, unless either they fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. If you use part of a copyrighted work under "fair use", or if you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of the license Wikipeai uses, you must make a note of that fact (along with the relevant names and dates). See Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission for the procedure for asking a copyright holder to grant a license to use their work under terms of the GFDL in the Wikipedia and for verifying that license has been granted. It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of Wikipedia's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the GFDL or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use or otherwise.

Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt the Wikipedia. If in doubt, re write the content yourself, thereby creating a new copyrighted work which can be included in the Wikipedia without trouble.

Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Wikipedia, so long as you do not follow the source too closely. (See our Copyright FAQ for more on how much reformulation may be necessary as well as the distinction between summary and abridgment.) However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference.

Linking to copyrighted works

Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any Wikipedia article which cites its sources will link to copyrighted material. It is not necessary to obtain the permission of a copyright holder before linking to copyrighted material, just as an author of a book does not need permission to cite someone else's work in their bibliography. Likewise, Wikipedia is not restricted to linking only to GFDL-free or open-source content.

However, if you know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of the creator's copyright, do not link to that copy of the work. An example would be linking to a site hosting the lyrics of many popular songs without permission from their copyright holders. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States (Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry [1]). Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on Wikipedia and its editors. The copyright status of Internet archives in the United States is unclear, however. It is currently acceptable to link to internet archives such as the Wayback Machine, which host unmodified archived copies of webpages taken at various points in time. In articles about a website, it is acceptable to include a link to that website even if there are possible copyright violations somewhere on the site.

Context is also important; it may be acceptable to link to a bookseller website's page on a particular book, even if it presents an image of that book (such uses are generally either explicitly permitted by publishers or allowed under fair use). However, linking directly to an image of the book cover removes the context and the site's justification for permitted use or fair use.

Copyright violations

See also: Wikipedia:Copyright violations

Contributors who repeatedly post copyrighted material despite appropriate warnings may be blocked from editing by any administrator to prevent further problems.

If you suspect a copyright violation, you should at least bring up the issue on that page's discussion page. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed. Some cases will be false alarms. For example, text that can be found elsewhere on the Web that was in fact copied from Wikipedia in the first place is not a copyright violation on Wikipedia's part.

If a page contains material which infringes copyright, that material – and the whole page, if there is no other material present – should be removed. See Wikipedia:Copyright violations for more information, and Wikipedia:Copyright problems for detailed instructions.

Image guidelines

Images and photographs, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone holds the copyright unless they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Images on the internet need to be licensed directly from the copyright holder or someone able to license on their behalf. In some cases, fair use guidelines may allow an image to be used irrespective of any copyright claims.

Image description pages must be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images, as described at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags. Untagged or incorrectly-tagged images will be deleted.

U.S. government photographs

Works produced by civilian and military employees of the United States federal government in the scope of their employment are public domain by statute in the United States (though they may be protected by copyright outside the U.S.). It is not enough that the employee was working at the time; he/she must have made the work as part of his/her duties (e.g. a soldier who takes a photograph with his/her personal camera while on patrol in Iraq owns the copyright to the photo, but it may find its way onto a unit webpage or otherwise be licensed to the government).

However, not every work republished by the U.S. government falls into this category. The U.S. government can own copyrights that are assigned to it by others -- for example, works created by contractors.

Moreover, images and other media found on .mil and .gov websites may be using commercial stock photography owned by others. It may be useful to check the privacy and security notice of the website, but only with an email to the webmaster can you be confident that an image is in the public domain.

It should also be noted that governments outside the U.S. often do claim copyright over works produced by their employees (for example, Crown copyright in the United Kingdom). Also, most state and local governments in the United States do not place their work into the public domain and do in fact own the copyright to their work. Please be careful to check copyright information before copying.

Source

United States Code; Title 17; Chapter 1; § 105 Subject matter of copyright; United States Government works.

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

US Code

UK Copyright

The Writers Copyright Association as well as the UK Copyright service has a good summary. The legal basis is the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, and subsequent modifications and revisions, details at Jenkins IP In particular for literary, artistic works, copyright ends 70 years after the last surviving author dies or if unknown, 70 years after creation or publication.

The UK Office of Public Sector Information, formerly HMSO, has told us:

Crown copyright protection in published material lasts for fifty years from the end of the year in which the material was first published. Therefore material published [fifty-one years ago], and any Crown copyright material published before that date, would now be out of copyright, and may be freely reproduced throughout the world.[2]

Comments on copyright laws by country

Russia: copyright exemptions

According to the Russian copyright law of 1993 (Федеральный закон от 9.07.1993 № 5351-1), the following items are not subject to copyrights:

• Official documents (laws, court decisions, other texts of legislative, administrative or judicial character);
• State symbols and tokens (flags, coats of arms, orders, banknotes and other state symbols and tokens);
• Folk creative works;
• Reports about events and facts, of informative character.

Russian copyrights generally expire 70 years after the death of the author. Items by authors who died prior to 1953 are in the public domain – before 2004, the expiration term was 50 years. The copyright extension in 2004 was not retroactive (see Law 72-FZ, 2004 (in Russian), article 2, part 3).

If an item was not published during its author's life, its copyright expires 70 years after its first lawful publication (if the item did not fall into the public domain before). This gives maximum term for unpublished or posthumously published works of 140 (if the author died after 1953) or 120 years (if the author died before 1953, AND their work was published before 2003).

If an item was published anonymously or pseudonymously, and its author remains unknown, its copyright expires 70 years after its first lawful publication. If the author is discovered, the usual rule applies.

Public domain status of a work in Russia can differ from that in the US, where Wikipedia servers are located.

Algeria

Article 9 of Algeria's Ordonnance N°97-10 du 27 Chaoual 1417 correspondant au 6 mars 1997 relative aux droits d'auteur et aux droits voisins. states that: "Works of the State made licitly accessible to the public may be freely used for non-profit purposes, subject to respect for the integrity of the work and indication of its source. By "works of the State", in this article, are meant works produced and published by the various organs of the State, local communities, or public establishments of an administrative character." (original is in French.) In short, they are available for non-commercial use - which is considered unfree on Wikipedia.

Afghanistan, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, San Marino, Yemen

According to Circular 38a of the U.S. Copyright Office, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, San Marino, and possibly Yemen have no copyright relations whatsoever with the U.S. (Eritrea isn't mentioned at all.) Works originating in one of these countries thus are not copyrighted in the United States, regardless of the local copyright laws of these countries (see 17 USC § 104, quoted in the circular).

Regardless, according to Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, Wikipedia contributors should respect the copyright law of these nations as best they can, the same as they do for other countries around the world.[3]

Introducing invariant sections or cover texts in Wikipedia

Under Wikipedia's current copyright conditions, and with the current facilities of the MediaWiki software, it is only possible to include in Wikipedia external GFDL materials that contain invariant sections or cover texts, if all of the following apply,

1. You are the copyright holder of these external GFDL materials (or: you have the explicit, i.e. written, permission of the copyright holder to do what follows);
2. The length and nature of these invariant sections and cover texts does not exceed what can be placed in an edit summary;
3. You are satisfied that these invariant sections and cover texts are not listed elsewhere than in the "page history" of the page where these external materials are placed;
4. You are satisfied that further copies of Wikipedia content are distributed under the standard GFDL application of "with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts" (in other words, for the copies derived from wikipedia, you agree that these parts of the text contributed by you will no longer be considered as "invariant sections" or "cover texts" in the GFDL sense);
5. The original invariant sections and/or cover texts are contained in the edit summary of the edit with which you introduce the thus GFDLed materials in wikipedia (so, that if "permanent deletion" would be applied to that edit, both the thus GFDLed material and its invariant sections and cover texts are jointly deleted).

Seen the stringent conditions above, it is very desirable to replace GFDL texts with invariant sections (or with cover texts) by original content without invariant sections (or cover texts) whenever possible.

Reusers' rights and obligations

If you want to use Wikipedia materials in your own books/articles/websites or other publications, you can do so -- but only in compliance with the GFDL. If you are simply duplicating the Wikipedia article, you must follow section two of the GFDL on verbatim copying, as discussed at Wikipedia:Verbatim copying.

If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails the following:

• your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL,
• you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B), and
• you must provide access to the "transparent copy" of the material (section 4J). (The "transparent copy" of a Wikipedia article is any of a number of formats available from us, including the wiki text, the html web pages, xml feed, etc.)

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the Wikipedia article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that the Wikimedia Foundation makes no guarantee to retain authorship information and a transparent copy of articles. Therefore, you are encouraged to provide this authorship information and a transparent copy with your derived works.

Example notice

An example notice, for an article that uses the Wikipedia article Metasyntactic variable might read as follows:

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Metasyntactic variable".

("Metasyntactic variable" and the URLs enclosed in the above must of course be substituted as necessary.)

Alternatively you can distribute your copy of "Metasyntactic variable" and list at least five (or all if fewer than five) principal authors on the title page (or top of the document), as explained in the text of the GFDL license. The external Page History Stats tool can help you identify the principal authors. All (re-)distributed documents need to include a copy of the GFDL license text.

Fair use materials and special requirements

All original Wikipedia text is distributed under the GFDL. Wikipedia articles may also include quotations, images, or other media under the U.S. Copyright law "fair use" doctrine in accordance with our guidelines for non-free content. It is preferred that these be obtained under the most free content license practical (such as the GFDL or public domain). In cases where no such images/sounds are currently available, then fair use may be used in certain circumstances as described in the criteria for using non-free media.

In Wikipedia, such "fair use" material should be identified as from an external source (on the image description page, or history page, as appropriate). This also leads to possible restrictions on the use, outside of Wikipedia, of such "fair use" content retrieved from Wikipedia: this "fair use" content does not fall under the GFDL license as such, but under the "fair use" (or similar/different) regulations in the country where the media are retrieved.

Wikipedia does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original Wikipedia text (such as including Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover Texts). When wanting to contribute such texts that include Invariant Sections or Cover Texts to Wikipedia, see Introducing invariant sections or cover texts in Wikipedia above.

If you are the owner of Wikipedia-hosted content being used without your permission

If you are the owner of content that is being used on Wikipedia without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from Wikipedia; see Request for immediate removal of copyright violation. You can also contact our designated agent to have it permanently removed (but it may take up to a week for the page to be deleted that way). You may also blank the page and replace it with the words {{copyvio|URL or place you published the text}} but the text will still be in the page history. Either way, we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.

Inversely, if you are the editor of a Wikipedia article and have found a copy hosted without recognizing Wikipedia or GFDL licence please see Wikipedia:Standard GFDL violation letter.

See also

• Wikipedia:Copyright FAQ
• Wikipedia:Non-U.S. copyrights
• The Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ for questions on copyright.
• Wikipedia's designated agent under OCILLA
• Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks
• Wikipedia:Standard GFDL violation letter
• Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements
• Wikipedia:Spotting possible copyright violations
• Wikipedia:Fair use
• Wikipedia:Image copyright tags
• Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission

Further discussion...

• Wikipedia:Copyright problems
• m:Wikipedia and copyright issues
• m:Avoid Copyright Paranoia
• m:Permission grant extent