Project:Use of copyrighted materials
 | This page documents an Online Communipedia policy. It describes facets of project governance or standards that all editors need to follow. |
All content provided to this project is released under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 4.0) license after every edit. Therefore, any editor wishing to contribute must provide content that is:
- Their own content which they are releasing under the same license; or
- Is content which has a compatible license to CC BY-SA 4.0.
It is the obligation of editors providing content to verify that such content is under a compatible license. If there is any doubt, administrators may remove such content until verification is made. Note that all content created is by default fully copyrighted with all rights reserved unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Text
When dealing with taking text from other sources, a link to the original source it came from must be provided on the relevant articles' talk page unless it is CC0, since all other compatible licenses require attribution.
This is done by adding Template:Copyright attribution talk (if not already present) to the top of the article's talk page. This will create a new section labeled "Copyright attribution". All future attribution of copyright on the article can be done by adding various Template:Copyright attribution table templates underneath the newly created section. After the table is complete, an editor must add their signature underneath their template invocation (e.g ~~~~ beneath the table). An example of this done successfully is found here.
See Template:Copyright attribution table's documentation for more information.
Taking text from Wikipedia
When taking content from Wikipedia, per their policy on reusing Wikipedia content outside of the site, providing all of the following in an edit summary is suitable attribution and the process above may be circumvented.
- An explicit declaration that content was taken from Wikipedia.
- A link to the BY-SA 3.0 license.
- A link to the page that content was taken from.
- An explicit declaration of whether or not the taken content was modified in any way.
The following is a boilerplate that can be used (obviously the last sentence should be changed based on the circumstances, but it is very rare that content taken is not modified in some form):
Content in this edit was taken from Wikipedia. This content is licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. The content was originally from <FULL URL TO PAGE>. The content taken from Wikipedia has been modified.
Images
For the sake of minimizing the legal liability of the project, the image must fall under one of the following Creative Commons licenses:
- CC0
- CC BY-1.0
- CC By-2.0
- CC BY-2.5
- CC BY-3.0
- CC BY-4.0
- CC BY-SA-1.0
- CC BY-SA-2.0
- CC BY-SA-2.5
- CC BY-SA-3.0
- CC BY-SA-4.0
Or it must meet one of the following criteria:
- The image is comprised of simple geometric shapes and words and thus under United States copyright law[1] is not original enough for copyright protection.[2]
- The image is a logo being used in accordance with fair use for the sole purpose of identifying an organization or community.
- The image has been declared in some fashion to be released under the public domain outside of a Creative Commons License.
Even if another license or rationale may technically allow an image to be hosted by the Online Community Wiki, the image is ineligible for inclusion by policy.
To mark the image's copyright, select the appropriate option when using Special:Upload. The uploader must also place in the file summary the source the image came from unless they select the option indicating it is their own image they are releasing.
Screenshots
It may be beneficial to the project for screenshots of a community's communications platform (e.g Discord, TeamSpeak) or website to be taken and placed on the relevant article. The owner of the communications platform and/or website tend to hold all rights over their official logos and branding. However, simple text with formatting - such as is found within websittes or in communications platforms - is not protected by the relevant company's copyright.
As such, screenshots that comprise of just text from such sources may be uploaded under any compatible license.
Instant Commons
Online Community Wiki has opted into using the InstantCommons feature. As such, any image obtained via such feature may be used freely (so long as there are no additional restrictions that may inhibit use), as all content on that site is de-facto under a compatible license.