Copyrights

From Wikiprogress.org

Wikiprogress content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikiprogress article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Wikiprogress articles therefore will remain free under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom.

To fulfill the above goals, the text contained in Wikiprogress is copyrighted (automatically under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works) by Wikiprogress contributors and licensed to the public under the GFDL. The text of this license must not be changed.

• Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
• Content on Wikiprogress is covered by disclaimers.

The English text of the GFDL is the only legally binding document; what follows is our interpretation of the GFDL: the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to Wikiprogress, you thereby license it to the 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, 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 is itself published under GFDL.

In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the GFDL license for the copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain under GFDL until they enter the public domain.

In the second case, if you incorporate external GFDL 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.

Using copyrighted work from others

All works are copyrighted 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 our license, you must make a note of that fact (along with names and dates). It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of Wikiprogress'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.

Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt the project. If in doubt, write it yourself.

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 Wikiprogress. 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 Wikiprogress 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, Wikiprogress is not restricted to linking only to GFDL-free or open-source content.

However, if you know that an external website is carrying a work in violation of the creator's copyright, do not link to that copy of the work. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States ([1]). Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on Wikiprogress and its editors.

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 inform the Wikiprogress Community and 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 Wikiprogress in the first place is not a copyright violation – at least not on Wikiprogress'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.

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 a photograph to be used.

Image description pages must be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images. Untagged or incorrectly-tagged images will be deleted. It is currently unclear what should happen in cases where the same image has been uploaded more than once with different respective copyright statements.

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 of the US).

However, not every work republished by the US government falls into this category. The US 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 US 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

Comments on copyright laws by country

Russia: copyright exemptions

According to the Russian copyright law of 1993, 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 with that in the US, where Wikiprogress servers are located.

Algeria

Article 9 of Algeria's Ordonnance N°97-10 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 Wikiprogress.

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

According to Circular 38a of the US Copyright Office, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, San Marino, and possibly Yemen have no copyright relations whatsoever with the US (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).

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 and artistic works, copyright ends 70 years after the last surviving author dies or if unknown, 70 years after creation or publication.
  

Re-users' rights and obligations

If you want to use Wikiprogress materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). 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 Wikiprogress 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 Wikiprogress article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that no guarantee is granted 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.

Fair use materials and special requirements

All original Wikiprogress text is distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Wikiprogress articles may also include quotations, images, or other media under the US 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 Wikiprogress, 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 Wikiprogress, of such fair use content retrieved from Wikiprogress: 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.

Wikiprogress does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original Wikiprogress text (such as including Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover Texts).

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

If you are the owner of content that is being used on Wikiprogress without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed. If you ask content to be removed from Wikiprogress, we will need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.