CreationWiki 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 CreationWiki article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). CreationWiki articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom.
To fulfill the above goals, the CreationWiki is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
| You are free:
Under the following conditions:
With the understanding that:
- 1 Users' rights and obligations
- 2 Image guidelines
- 3 Comments on copyright laws by country
- 4 Contributors' rights and obligations
- 5 If you are the owner of CreationWiki-hosted content being used without your permission
- 6 See Also
Users' rights and obligations
You are permitted to use material from the CreationWiki in your own books, articles, websites, or other publications provided that you follow the guidelines of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. This involves providing a proper notice as to the source of the material, and you may not alter the conditions under which the material may be used subsequently.
An example notice, for an article that uses the CreationWiki article Fractal geometry might read as follows:
- This article is licensed under the <a href="http://creationwiki.org/CreationWiki:Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_License">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License</a>. It uses material from the <a href="http://www.creationwiki.org/Fractal_geometry">CreationWiki article "Fractal geometry"</a>.
("Fractal geometry" and the CreationWiki URL must of course be substituted accordingly.)
To obtain help with formatting citations of CreationWiki articles use the Cite This Page tool in the "tools" box in the left-side margin.
Fair use materials and special requirements
All original CreationWiki text is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Occasionally, CreationWiki articles may include images, sounds, or text quotes used under the U.S. Copyright law "fair use" doctrine. It is preferred that these be obtained under the most free license (such as the GFDL or public domain) practical. In cases where no such images/sounds are currently available, then fair use images are acceptable (until such time as free images become available).
In CreationWiki, 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 CreationWiki, of such "fair use" content retrieved from CreationWiki: 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.
CreationWiki does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original CreationWiki text (such as including Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover Texts).
Images and photographs, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone owns them 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.
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. However, note that, despite popular misconception, the U.S. Federal Government can own copyrights that are assigned to it by others (for example, works created by contractors). Be careful, however: not all images on .mil and .gov websites are public domain. Among other reasons, the site 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 U.S. 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 ownership information before copying.
UK Crown Copyright
The UK Office of Public Sector Information:
- Crown copyright protection in published material lasts for fifty years from the end of the year in which the material was first published. Therefore [for example] 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.
Legitimate photographs generally come from three different places with permission.
- The studios, producers, magazine publisher, or media outlet that originally shot the photograph.
- Agencies that represent the photographers who shot the photos or the photographer themself (the latter especially for amateur photographs)
- Submissions from the celebrity himself or herself or a legal representative of the celebrity.
Comments on copyright laws by country
Russia: copyright exemptions
According to the Russian copyright law of 1993 (Федеральный закон от 9.07.1993 № 5351-1), 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 in 70 years after the death of the author. Items by authors who died prior to 1953 are public domain, because the expiration term was 50 years before 2004, and this change of the term wasn't retroactive, according to Law 72-FZ, 2004 (in Russian), article 2, part 3).
If an item was not published during author's life, its copyright expire in 70 years after its first lawful publication (if the item wasn't moved into 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 his work was published before 2003).
If an item was published anonymously or pseudonymously, and its author remains unknown, its copyright expires in 70 years after its first lawful publication. If the author is discovered, usual rule applies.
PD status of a work in Russia can differ with that in the US, where CreationWiki servers are located.
Article 9 of Algeria's Ordonnance N°97-10 du 27 Chaoual 1417 correspondant au 6 mars 1997 relative aux droits d'auteur et aux droits voisins. 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 deprecated on CreationWiki.
Afghanistan, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, San Marino, Yemen
According to Circular 38a of the U.S. Copyright Office, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, San Marino, and possibly Yemen have no copyright relations whatsoever with the U.S. (Eritrea isn't mentioned at all.) Works originating in one of these countries thus are not copyrighted in the United States, irrespective of the local copyright laws of these countries (see 17 USC § 104, quoted in the circular).
Regardless, CreationWiki contributors should respect the copyright law of these nations as best they can, the same as they do for other countries around the world.
Contributors' rights and obligations
If you contribute material to CreationWiki, 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 therefore must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either
- you own 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 versions you placed here: that material will remain under GFDL forever.
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.
Introducing invariant sections or cover texts in CreationWiki
Under CreationWiki's current copyright conditions, and with the current facilities of the MediaWiki software, it is only possible to include in CreationWiki external GFDL materials that contain invariant sections or cover texts, if all of the following apply,
- 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);
- 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 CreationWiki 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 CreationWiki, 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 CreationWiki (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.
Using copyrighted work from others
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 CreationWiki'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 CreationWiki. 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
Linking to copyrighted works is usually not a problem, as long as you have made a reasonable effort to determine that the page in question is not violating someone else's copyright. If it is, please do not link to the page. Whether such a link is contributory infringement is currently being debated in the courts, but in any case, linking to a site that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on us. If the site in question is making fair use of the material, linking is OK.
If you find a copyright infringement
It is not the job of rank-and-file CreationWikians to police content for possible copyright infringement, but if you suspect one, you should at the very least bring up the issue on that page's talk page. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed. The most helpful piece of information you can provide is a URL or other reference to what you believe may be the source of the text.
Some cases will be false alarms. For example, if the contributor was in fact the author of the text that is published elsewhere under different terms, that does not affect their right to post it here under the GFDL. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on the Web that was copied from CreationWiki. In both of these cases, it is a good idea to make a note in the talk page to discourage such false alarms in the future.
If some of the content of a page really is an infringement, then the infringing content should be removed, and a note to that effect should be made on the talk page, along with the original source. If the author's permission is obtained later, the text can be restored.
If all of the content of a page is a suspected copyright infringement, then the page should be listed on CreationWiki:Copyright problems and the content of the page replaced by the standard notice which you can find there. If, after a week, the page still appears to be a copyright infringement, then it may be deleted following the procedures on the votes page.
In extreme cases of contributors continuing to post copyrighted material after appropriate warnings, such users may be blocked from editing to protect the project.
If you are the owner of CreationWiki-hosted content being used without your permission
If you are the owner of content that is being used on CreationWiki without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from CreationWiki; see Recommend deletion. You can also contact an administrator to have it permanently removed.
NOTE: Majority of page content was derived from Wikipedia