WikiMD:Copyrights

CC BY SA

WikiMD's content is available under CC By SA no commercial use policy unless otherwise stated. A Creative Commons NonCommercial license (CC NC, CC BY-NC or NC license) is a Creative Commons license which a copyright holder can apply to their media to give public permission for anyone to reuse that media only for noncommercial activities.

Creative commons

Creative Commons is an organization which develops a variety of public copyright licenses, and the "noncommercial" licenses are a subset of these. Unlike the CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA licenses, the CC BY-NC license is considered non-free

Material from other sources

Occasionally, WikiMD might incorporate materials from other sites such as US government websites (public domain) or Wikipedia group of sites in which case the license terms of the source remain in effect - see Wikipedia

Content on Wikimd is covered by disclaimers.

IMPORTANT: If you want to use content from Wikimd, first read the Users' rights and obligations section. You should then read the text of CC by SA.

Fair use materials and special requirements

Occasionally, Wikimd articles may include images, sounds, or text quotes used under the U.S. Copyright law "fair use" doctrine. In this case, the material 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 Wikimd 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 Wikimd article for a commercial use that would otherwise be allowed by the GFDL and the fair use would not be allowed under that commercial use).

Wikimd does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original Wikimd text (such as including Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover Texts). When using these materials, you have to include those invariant sections verbatim.

Image guidelines

WikiMD prefers to have images uploaded to the Commons (form Wikimedia foundation) as any and all images on commons can be directly linked in as if they are local images on wikiMD. For the licensing terms of images from wikimedia commons, please visit Commons licensing

Please note that some of the 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.

Tagging

Image description pages can be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images, as described at Wikimd:image copyright tags. It is unclear what should happen if different images have been uploaded with different copyright statuses.

Government works and photographs

Works produced by 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 US Federal Government can own copyrights that are assigned to it by others. As a general rule photographs on .mil and .gov sites are public domain. However there are some notable exceptions. Check the privacy and security notice of the website. It should also be noted that governments outside the US often do claim copyright over works produced by their employees (for example, Crown Copyright in the United Kingdom). Also, most state 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.

Celebrity photographs

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

1. The studios, producers, magazine publisher, or media outlet that originally shot the photograph.
2. Agencies that represent the photographers who shot the photos or the photographer themself (the latter especially for amateur photographs)
3. Submissions from the celebrity themselves or a legal representatives of the celebrity.

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to Wikimd, 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. If the original copy required invariant sections, you have to incorporate those into the Wikimd article; it is however very desirable to replace GFDL texts with invariant sections by original content without invariant sections 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 Wikimd'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. See Wikimd: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 GFDL.

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 Wikimd. (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 you find a copyright infringement

It is not the job of rank-and-file Wikimds 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 GFDL. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on the Web that was copied from Wikimd. 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 it on Wikimd:Possible copyright infringements 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 infringment, 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 Wikimd-hosted content being used without your permission

If you are the owner of content that is being used on Wikimd without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from Wikimd by following this link. You can also contact our 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). Either way, we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership. Also Legal and Medical disclaimers