The text contained in WeRelate is licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License, hereinafter referred to as the GFDL. The full text of this license is encorporated herein.
This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, WeRelate 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 WeRelate article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). WeRelate articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom.
The English text of the GFDL is the only legally binding document; what follows is our interpretation of the GFDL: the rights and obligations of users and contributors.
IMPORTANT: If you want to use content from WeRelate, first read the Users' rights and obligations section. You should then read the GFDL.
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If you want to use WeRelate materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GFDL.
If you are simply duplicating the WeRelate article, you must follow section two of the GFDL on verbatim copying.
If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails the following:
You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the WeRelate article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc. makes no guarantee to retain authorship information and a transparent copy of articles. Therefore, you are encouraged to provide this authorship information and a transparent copy with your derived works.
An example notice, for an article that uses the WeRelate article Phillips in Texas might read as follows:
("Phillips in Texas" and the WeRelate URL must of course be substituted accordingly.)
Alternatively you can distribute your copy of "Phillips in Texas" along with a copy of the GFDL (as explained in the text) and list at least five (or all if fewer than five) principal authors on the title page (or top of the document). You can select the history button for any page to help you identify the principal authors.
All original WeRelate text is distributed under the GFDL. Occasionally, WeRelate 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 (libre) 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 such a 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 WeRelate 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 WeRelate "fair use" image for a commercial purpose that would not be allowed meet "fair use" criteria.
WeRelate does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original Wikipedia 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.
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. See Help:Image licensing for more information.
All pages in the Person and Family namespaces are dual licensed under the Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL) and the Creative Commons BY-SA 2.5 License (CC-BY-SA). This means that others may sell, use, republish and distribute these pages under either the GFDL or CC-BY-SA license. This allows Person and Family pages to be republished at Wikipedia.org and other websites licensed under the GFDL and also allows users to publish printed books with text from Person and Family pages without reprinting the lengthy GFDL license, so long as they include a link to the CC-BY-SA license. Republication under either the GFDL or CC-BY-SA license requires proper attribution (republisher must give the authors' credit) and must make all extensions and derivative works freely available under the same license. See each license's website for details.
Soviet copyright laws are non-retroactive, and all works published in Soviet Union prior to May 27, 1973 remain unprotected outside the former Soviet Union.
According to the Russian copyright law of 1993 (Федеральный закон от 9.07.1993 № 5351-1), the following items are not subject to copyrights:
Russian copyrights expire in 70 years after the death of the author.
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 Wikipedia.
Although there has been no treaty between Iran and the United States regarding copyright protection, contributors should respect Iranian copyright law as best they can, the same as they do for other countries around the world.
If you contribute material to WeRelate, 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
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 Wikipedia article; it is however very desirable to replace GFDL texts with invariant sections by original content without invariant sections whenever possible.
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 WeRelate'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 WeRelate. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference. See plagarism 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 users 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 WeRelate. 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, please email WeRelate Copyright infringement Review Committee and the content of the page replaced. If, after a week, the page still appears to be a copyright infringement, then it may be deleted.
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 WeRealte without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from WeRelate by emailing Copyright Infringement Review Committee. 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.
| This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Wikipedia Copyright. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. |
