Wookieepedia:Copyrights

The license Wookieepedia uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, Wookieepedia 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 Wookieepedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Wookieepedia 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 text contained in Wookieepedia is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, or CC-BY-SA. A human-readable summary of this license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

The text of the CC-BY-SA license is the only legally binding document; what follows is our interpretation of the CC-BY-SA license: the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

If you want to use Wookieepedia materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the terms of the CC-BY-SA. If you are simply duplicating the Wookieepedia article, you simply need to properly attribute the work and note that it is licensed under CC-BY-SA. One way to attribute the work is to provide a conspicuous hyperlink back to the Wookieepedia article (or the URL of the article if in print form), however Wookieepedia does not guarantee that we will retain the article (and with it, the authorship history), so you may want to copy this list of authors from the page history.

If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails the following:

• your materials in turn have to be licensed under CC-BY-SA, and
• you must acknowledge the authorship of the article, and
• you must acknowledge that you have modified it.

As stated above, the second requirement can be fulfilled with a hyperlink back the the article on Wookieepedia (or the URL if in print form), but since retention of the page history is not guaranteed, you are encouraged to provide the list of authors yourself.

An example notice, for an article that uses the Wookieepedia article Palpatine might read as follows:

("Palpatine" and the Wookieepedia URL must of course be substituted accordingly.)

Alternatively you can distribute your copy of "Palpatine" along with a hyperlink to, the URL of, or a copy of the CC-BY-SA and a list of the authors.

All original Wookieepedia text is distributed under the CC-BY-SA. Occasionally, Wookieepedia articles may include images, sounds, or text quotes used under the U.S. Copyright law "fair use" doctrine. As Wookieepedia intends to be a comprehensive encyclopedia of Star Wars canon, most images used on Wookieepedia will be non-free. In rare instances when non-official images are used, it is preferred that these be obtained under the most free (libre) license (such as the CC-BY-SA or public domain) practical.

The material used should be identified as from an external source (on the image description page, or history page, as appropriate). As "fair use" is specific to the use that you contemplate it is best if your describe the fair use rationale for such specific use either in hidden text in the article or on the image description page. Remember what is fair use for Wookieepedia may not be considered a fair use for your intended use of the content in another context.

For example, if we include an image under fair use, you must ensure that your use of the article also qualifies for fair use (this might not be the case, for example, if you were using a Wookieepedia article for a commercial use that would otherwise be allowed by the CC-BY-SA and the fair use would not be allowed under that commercial use).

Wookieepedia does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the CC-BY-SA.

Images that are displayed at Wookieepedia remain the property of their original creators, and are only included on this website for purposes of illustration under fair use guidelines. Every image has an owner, unless that image has been explicitly placed in the public domain. Unless the original author of the image expressly grants such permission, images do not fall under the scope of the CC-BY-SA. In all cases, images must be uploaded to our database rather than linked from other servers (see Wikipedia:Inline linking), and must be accompanied by a copyright tag.

File description pages must be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images, as described at Wookieepedia:Template messages/File namespace. Duplicate files will be erased, with the older file being retained in the case of identical files or the higher quality file being retained in other cases. If the two files have different copyright tags, an administrator will determine the appropriate tag to apply to the remaining file. Untagged files may be deleted by an administrator at any time.

Proper tag format will use the {{Information}} template and will include, at a minimum, the proper copyright tag, the source (as in a specific movie, book, video game, other official work, a website, or any other medium), a brief description of the subject of the file.

This is based on the image guidelines at The Internet Movie Database, so it especially applies to celebrity photographs, but also can apply to other pictures. Legitimate photographs generally come from three different places with permission.

Wookieepedia intends to be a comprehensive encyclopedia of Star Wars canon, and use of unofficial images is discouraged unless it cannot otherwise be avoided. When a fan-created image is used, it is preferable for it to be released under the CC-BY-SA like text content on Wookieepedia.

All other image postings are assumed to be allowed under fair use, and must be tagged as such.

If you contribute material to Wookieepedia, you thereby license it to the public under the CC-BY-SA. 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 CC-BY-SA, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under CC-BY-SA.

In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can later republish and re-license them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the CC-BY-SA license for the versions you placed here: that material will remain under CC-BY-SA forever. In the second case, if you incorporate external CC-BY-SA materials, as a requirement of the CC-BY-SA, you must acknowledge the authorship of the material.

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 Wookieepedia's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the CC-BY-SA or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use. See Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission for a form letter asking a copyright holder to grant us a license to use their work under terms of the CC-BY-SA.

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 perfectly legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate it in your own words, and submit it to Wookieepedia. (See plagiarism and fair use for discussions of how much reformulation is necessary in a general context.)

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.

It is not the job of rank-and-file Wookieepedians to police every article 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 CC-BY-SA. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on the Web that was copied from Wookieepedia. 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 Forum:Administrators' noticeboard and the content of the article 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 content that is being used on Wookieepedia without your permission, you may request the page be immediately removed. Leave a note explaining the situation on Forum:Administrators' noticeboard, or contact an administrator directly. If you feel the situation is serious enough to warrant it, you may also contact our host's Designated agent to have it permanently removed, but it may take up to a week for the page to be deleted that way (you may also blank the page but the text will still be in the page history). In any case, please provide the name of a person, along with their mailing address and e-mail address if possible, for a reply or follow-up letters, and we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.

This page is a derivative work from Wikipedia:Copyrights.