Difference between revisions of "Akvopedia:Copyrights"

Revision as of 03:47, 1 February 2009

Important note: The Netherlands Water Partnership (Akvopedia soon to be controlled by the Akvo Foundation) does not own copyright on Akvopedia article texts and illustrations. It is therefore useless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce content. Permission to reproduce content under the license and technical conditions applicable to Akvopeida (see below) has already been granted to everyone without request; for permission to use it outside these terms, one must contact all the volunteer authors of the text or illustration in question.

Note that much of this document refers to the [Wikipedia] for guidance on issues on copyright. See also Akvopedia:Policies_and_guidelines on how we use Wikipedia policies as guidelines at Akvopedia.

The license Akvopedia uses grants free access to our content in the same sense that [1] is licensed freely. This principle is known as [2]. Akvopedia 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 Akvopedia article used (a direct link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement). Akvopedia articles therefore will remain free under the GFDL and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom.

To this end, the text contained in Akvopedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by Akvopedia contributors and licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at Akvopedia: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 Akvopedia is covered by disclaimers.

The English text of the GFDL is the only legally binding document between authors and users of Akvopedia 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 Akvopedia, 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 Akvopedia, 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 domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. If you use part of a copyrighted work under "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 Akvopedia'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. See Wikipedia's boilerplate request form for an example of a form letter asking a copyright holder to grant us a license to use their work under terms of the GFDL.

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 Akvopedia. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference. See plagiarism and fair use for discussions of how much reformulation is necessary in a general context.

Linking to copyrighted works

Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any Akvopedia 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, Akvopedia is not restricted to linking only to GFDL-free or open-source content.

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, or contact the Akvo Foundation. 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 Akvopedia in the first place is not a copyright violation on Akvopedia'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. For guidance on how to to this see Wikipedia Copyright violations for more information, and Wikipedia:Copyright problems] for detailed guidance in the matter.

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.

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.[3]

Public domain status of a work in other countries can differ from that in the UK, where Akvopedia servers are located.

Introducing invariant sections or cover texts in Akvopedia

Under Akvopedia's current copyright conditions, and with the current facilities of the MediaWiki software, it is only possible to include in Akvopedia 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 Akvopedia 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 Akvopedia, 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 Akvopedia (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 Akvopedia 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 Akvopedia 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 Akvopedia 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 Akvopedia article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that the Akvopedia 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 Akvopedia article Rope pump might read as follows:

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Rope pump.

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

Alternatively you can distribute your copy of "Rope pump" 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. All (re-)distributed documents need to include a copy of the GFDL license text.

Fair use materials and special requirements

All original Akvopedia text is distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Akvopedia 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 Akvopedia, 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 Akvopedia, of such "fair use" content retrieved from Akvopedia: 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.

Akvopedia does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original Akvopedia 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 Akvopedia.

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

If you are the owner of content that is being used on Akvopedia without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from Akvopedia, please contact Akvo Foundation (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.

Acknowledgements

This material is derived from the Wikipedia Copyrights article in Wikipedia.