'''Important note:''' ''The Akvo Foundation (Akvopedia) 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 [[http://www.wikipedia.org 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 [[Main Page|Akvopedia]] uses grants free access to our content in the same sense that [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/free_software] is licensed freely. This principle is known as '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/copyleft]'''. 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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works Berne Convention]) by Akvopedia contributors and licensed to the public under the '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFDL GNU Free Documentation License]''' (GFDL). The full text of this license is at [[Akvopedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License]].
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.
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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism plagiarism] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use fair use] for discussions of how much reformulation is necessary in a general context.
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=== Linking to copyrighted works ===
Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any Akvopedia article which [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources 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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography bibliography]. Likewise, Akvopedia is not restricted to linking only to GFDL-free or open-source content.
