User:Hut 8.5/Copyright infringement

This page explains Wikipedia's policies regarding copyright. It was written by User:Hut 8.5 for the benefit of people commenting on his talk page. Further information can be found in the relevant official policies Wikipedia:Copyrights and Wikipedia:Copyright violations.

Copyright at Wikipedia

Wikipedia content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence (CC-BY-SA). This allows material from Wikipedia to be used for any purpose, so long as you acknowledge the source of the material and you licence any modification under the same licence. When you make an edit you are agreeing to licence your contributions under these terms.

Therefore Wikipedia can only use content from external sources if is is licensed in a way which is compatible with CC-BY-SA. The vast, vast majority of material on the internet isn't. Even if a particular website doesn't say explicitly that its material is copyrighted, copyright exists automatically unless the author explicitly says that it doesn't. Unless you are sure that material from a website is either in the public domain or is licensed in a way that it is compatible with the CC-BY-SA licence, do not add it to Wikipedia.

Deletion of copyright violations

Material that blatantly violates copyright can be deleted by any administrator on sight under WP:CSD#G12. Ambiguous cases are usually listed at Wikipedia:Copyright problems for evaluation and an administrator will process them after at least seven days. If evidence that including the material in Wikipedia does not violate copyright is not provided then the page will be deleted. If an editor sees that content added to Wikipedia can also be found on another website, and there is no indication that the website is in fact copying Wikipedia, then the Wikipedia article containing the content is likely to be flagged as a copyright violation.

If you want to contest a copyright-related deletion, you have several options, depending on the case.

• If the purported source of the material is in fact copying Wikipedia or the purported source doesn't have the same content as the article, note this on the article's talk page. If the article has already been deleted leave a message for the deleting admin or go to Wikipedia:Deletion review.
• If the website the material was copied from is licensed in a way that is compatible with Wikipedia, note this on the article's talk page. If the material has already been deleted leave a message for the deleting admin or go to Wikipedia:Deletion review. Note that in these cases the article should still acknowledge the source of the material in order to avoid plagiarism.
• If you own the copyright to the material you are copying, or have permission from the copyright holder to put it on Wikipedia, then simply stating this may delay deletion of the material but won't prevent it entirely unless you can provide supporting evidence. When it comes to legal questions such as copyright Wikipedia needs more than a claim from an editor (who could be anybody). Following the instructions here will allow the material to be used at Wikipedia.
• Rewrite the article from scratch. If you do this then the material won't be copyrighted and Wikipedia can use it. Don't merely make alterations to the original text as derivative works are still copyrighted - you have to start from a blank slate.

Other problems with copyright infringements

Frequently articles which are deleted as copyright infringements have other problems as well. This is especially true of articles copied from the website of the organisation the article is about. Such pages are often written to promote the subject, and Wikipedia is not here to promote organisations or products, so the material is often deleted anyway as advertising. I strongly recommend that you don't copy material from the website of an organisation you are writing about, even if you can resolve the copyright issues. If you are writing about an organisation you represent or are employed by you should read the conflict of interest guideline (and you should probably refrain from writing about that subject at all).

Material from external sources is also usually written in a way that isn't compatible with Wikipedia's manual of style or what Wikipedia is not and has to be extensively rewritten by other editors in order to make it compliant.

The bottom line

Unless you know exactly what you are doing, particularly if you are new, then it is almost always better to write content from scratch instead of copying it from somewhere else. Wikipedia:Your first article has some good advice if you are creating a new page.