New World Encyclopedia: Copyrights

Important note: The New World Encyclopedia (NWE) does not own a traditional copyright on article texts and illustrations. It is therefore pointless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce articles or images, we have provided links at the bottom of each article that provide sufficient citation for all permissions to reproduce content under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and GNU Free Document License and technical conditions which apply to content has already been granted to anyone anywhere by the authors of individual articles.

Images and a few articles may have other licensing terms; the conditions for reproduction of each image should be individually checked. The only exceptions are those cases in which editors have violated NWE policy by uploading copyrighted material without authorization, or with copyright licensing terms which are incompatible with those authors have applied to their content. While every effort has been made to detected and remove and copyright infringements, it would be a violation to copy such material. For permission to use it, one must contact the owner of the copyright of text or an illustration in question; often, but not always, this will be the original author.

Most articles in the New World Encyclopedia were originally copied from and credited to Wikipedia, before being edited according to New World Encyclopedia standards, with New World Encyclopedia creating a fork in the article history. Normally the same license applies to New World Encyclopedia articles as to Wikipedia articles. The license New World Encyclopedia uses grants free access to content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft in contrast to typical copyright licenses. Content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and acknowledgment of the authors of the New World Encyclopedia article used is included (a link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement). Copied content will therefore remain free and can continue to be used by anyone subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom.

To this end, the text of the New World Encyclopedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by New World Encyclopedia and Wikipedia editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-SA) and GNU Free Documentation License:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-SA) and, unless otherwise noted, the GNU Free Documentation License, unversioned, with no invariant sections, with no front-cover texts, and with no back-cover texts.

A copy of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License is included in the section entitled New_World_Encyclopedia:Creative_Commons_CC-by-sa_3.0.

A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Content on New World Encyclopedia is covered by disclaimers.

The English text of the CC-by-SA and GFDL licenses is the only legally binding restriction between authors and users of New World Encyclopedia content. What follows is our interpretation of the CC-by-SA and GFDL, as it pertains to the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

IMPORTANT: If you wish to reuse content from New World Encyclopedia, first read the section below. You should then read the GNU Free Documentation License.

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to New World Encyclopedia, you thereby license it to the public under the CC-by-SA and GFDL (unversioned with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Non-text media may be contributed under a variety of different licenses that support the general goal of allowing unrestricted re-use and re-distribution.

If you want to import text that you have found elsewhere or that you have co-authored with others, you can only do so if it is available under terms that are compatible with the CC-BY-SA license. You do not need to ensure or guarantee that the imported text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Furthermore, please note that you cannot import information which is available only under the GFDL. In other words, you may only import text that is (a) single-licensed under terms compatible with the CC-BY-SA license or (b) dual-licensed with the GFDL and another license with terms compatible with the CC-BY-SA license. If you are the sole author of the material, you must license it under both CC-BY-SA and GFDL.

If the material, text or media, has been previously published and you wish to donate it to New World Encyclopedia under the appropriate license, you will need to verify copyright permission through one of our established procedures. If you are not a copyright holder, you will still need to verify copyright permission.

You retain copyright to your materials. Copyright is never transferred to New World Encyclopedia. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract or alter the license for copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain so licensed until they enter the public domain when your copyright expires (currently some decades after an author's death). (If the material has been previously published, you will need to verify copyright permission through one of our established procedures.)

Using copyrighted work from others

All creative works are copyrighted, by international agreement, unless either they fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. There are some circumstances under which copyrighted works may be legally utilized without permission; see Wikipedia:Non-free content for specific details on when and how to utilize such material. However, it is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of Wikipedia's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under CC-BY-SA and GFDL (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts) or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use or otherwise.

If you want to import media (including text) that you have found elsewhere you can only do so if it is public domain or available under terms that are compatible with the CC-BY-SA license. If you import media under a compatible license which requires attribution, you must, in a reasonable fashion, credit the author(s). You must also in most cases verify that the material is compatibly licensed or public domain. If the original source of publication contains a copyright disclaimer or other indication that the material is free for use, a link to it on the media description page or the article's talk page may satisfy this requirement. If you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under compatible terms, you must make a note of that fact (along with the relevant names and dates) and verify this through one of several processes.

Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities. If in doubt, write the content yourself, thereby creating a new copyrighted work that can be included in New World Encyclopedia without trouble.

Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. It is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to NWE, so long as you do not follow the source too closely. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference.

Linking to copyrighted works

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

However, if you know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of the creator's copyright, do not link to that copy of the work. An example would be linking to a site hosting the lyrics of many popular songs without permission from their copyright holders. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States (Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry [1]). Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on Wikipedia and its editors. The copyright status of Internet archives in the United States is unclear, however. It is currently acceptable to link to internet archives such as the Wayback Machine, which host unmodified archived copies of webpages taken at various points in time. In articles about a website, it is acceptable to include a link to that website even if there are possible copyright violations somewhere on the site.

Context is also important; it may be acceptable to link to a reputable website's review of a particular film, even if it presents a still from the film (such uses are generally either explicitly permitted by distributors or allowed under fair use). However, linking directly to the still of the film removes the context and the site's justification for permitted use or fair use.

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. 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 Wikipedia in the first place is not a copyright violation on Wikipedia'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. See Wikipedia:Copyright violations for more information, and Wikipedia:Copyright problems for detailed instructions.

Guidelines for images and other media files

Images, photographs, video and sound files, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone holds the copyright unless they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Images, video and sound files 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 them to be used irrespective of any copyright claims; see Wikipedia:Non-free content for more.

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.

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 in the United States (though they may be protected by copyright outside the U.S.). It is not enough that the employee was working at the time; he/she must have made the work as part of his/her duties (e.g. a soldier who takes a photograph with his/her personal camera while on patrol in Iraq owns the copyright to the photo, but it may find its way onto a unit webpage or otherwise be licensed to the government).

However, not every work republished by the U.S. government falls into this category. The U.S. government can own copyrights that are assigned to it by others -- for example, works created by contractors.

Moreover, images and other media found on .mil and .gov websites 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 copyright information before copying.

Source

United States Code; Title 17; Chapter 1; § 105 Subject matter of copyright; United States Government works.

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

US Code

Comments on copyright laws by country

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.) Published works originating in one of these countries thus are not copyrighted in the United States, regardless of the local copyright laws of these countries. See 17 U.S.C. § 104(b), quoted in the Circular. Unpublished works, however, are copyrighted regardless of their origin or of the nationality of the works' authors, as long as they remain unpublished. See 17 U.S.C. § 104(a).

Algeria

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 considered unfree on NWE.

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 70 years after the death of the author. Items by authors who died prior to 1953 are in the public domain – before 2004, the expiration term was 50 years. The copyright extension in 2004 was not retroactive (see Law 72-FZ, 2004 (in Russian), article 2, part 3).

If an item was not published during its author's life, its copyright expires 70 years after its first lawful publication (if the item did not fall into the 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 their work was published before 2003).

If an item was published anonymously or pseudonymously, and its author remains unknown, its copyright expires 70 years after its first lawful publication. If the author is discovered, the usual rule applies.

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.[2]

Reusers' rights and obligations

If you want to use other NWE materials in your own books/articles/websites or other publications, you can do so, unless it is used under the non-free content provisions — but only in compliance with the licensing terms. Please follow the guidelines below:

Re-use of text

Attribution: To re-distribute a text page in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.) This applies to text developed by the Wikipedia community. Text from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which should be indicated on an article's face or on its talk page. For example, a page may have a banner or other notation indicating that some or all of its content was originally published somewhere else. Where such notations are visible in the page itself, they should generally be preserved by re-users.
Copyleft/Share Alike: If you make modifications or additions to the page you re-use, you must license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 or later.
Indicate changes: If you make modifications or additions, you must indicate in a reasonable fashion that the original work has been modified. If you are re-using the page in a wiki, for example, indicating this in the page history is sufficient.
Licensing notice: Each copy or modified version that you distribute must include a licensing notice stating that the work is released under CC-BY-SA and either a) a hyperlink or URL to the text of the license or b) a copy of the license. For this purpose, a suitable URL is: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

For further information, please refer to the legal code of the CC-BY-SA License.

Additional availability of text under the GNU Free Documentation License

For compatibility reasons, any page which does not incorporate text that is exclusively available under CC-BY-SA or a CC-BY-SA-compatible license is also available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. In order to determine whether a page is available under the GFDL, review the page footer, page history, and discussion page for attribution of single-licensed content that is not GFDL-compatible. All text published before June 15th, 2009 on Wikipedia was released under the GFDL, and you may also use the page history to retrieve content published before that date to ensure GFDL compatibility.

Re-use of non-text media

Where not otherwise noted, non-text media files are available under various free culture licenses, consistent with the Wikimedia Foundation Licensing Policy. Please view the media description page for details about the license of any specific media file.

Non-free materials and special requirements

NWE articles may also include quotations, images, or other media under the U.S. Copyright law "fair use" doctrine. Such "fair use" material should be identified as from an external source by an appropriate method. This leads to possible restrictions on the use, outside of NWE, of such "fair use" content retrieved from NWE. This "fair use" content does not fall under the CC-BY-SA or GFDL license as such, but under the "fair use" (or similar/different) regulations in the country where the media are retrieved.

Prior to June 15, 2009, NWE permitted some text under licenses that were compatible with the GFDL but might require additional terms that were not required for original NWE text (such as including invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). However, these materials could only be placed if the original copyright holders did not require that they be carried forward; for that reason, they impose no special burden for reuse.

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

If you are the owner of content that is being used on NWE without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from NWE. You can also contact our [agent] to have it permanently removed.

Inversely, if you are the editor of a NWE article and have found a copy hosted without following the licensing requirements for attribution, please contact our [agent].