'''Important note:''' ''The Netherlands Water Partnership Akvo Foundation (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 [[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]].
== Contributors' rights and obligations ==
If you contribute material to WikipediaAkvopedia, you thereby license it to the public
under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover
texts).
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.
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 WikipediaAkvopedia. 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 ===
# The length and nature of these invariant sections and cover texts does not exceed what can be placed in an edit summary;
# 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;
# 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 wikipediaAkvopedia, 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);
# 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.
''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 Wikipedia 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 <nowiki>{{copyvio|</nowiki>''URL or place you published the text''<nowiki>}}</nowiki> 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.
== Aknowledgements Acknowledgements ==This material is derived from the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights Wikipedia Copyrights] article in [http://www.wikipedia.org Wikipedia].
This material is derived from the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia[Category:Copyrights Wikipedia CopyrightsAkvopedia] article in [http://www.wikipedia.org Wikipedia].
