LifeWiki:Copyrights

The license LifeWiki uses grants free access to our content. LifeWiki 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 LifeWiki article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies the attribution requirement). LifeWiki articles therefore will remain free under the GFDL and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom.

To this end, the text contained in LifeWiki is copyrighted by LifeWiki contributors and licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license can be found at GNU.org.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.

If you wish to reuse content from LifeWiki, first read the Reusers' rights and obligations section. You should then read the GNU Free Documentation License.

The English text of the GFDL is the only legally binding document between authors and users of LifeWiki content. What follows is our interpretation of the GFDL, as it pertains to the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to LifeWiki, 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 must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either

• you hold 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 copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain under GFDL until they enter the public domain.

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.

Using copyrighted work from others

All works are copyrighted unless either they fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. 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 LifeWiki's material as possible, so original images 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 LifeWiki. 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 article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to LifeWiki. 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 LifeWiki 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, Wikipedia 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. Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on LifeWiki and its editors.

Context is also important; it may be acceptable to link to a bookseller website's page on a particular book, even if it presents an image of that book (such uses are generally either explicitly permitted by publishers or allowed under fair use). However, linking directly to an image of the book cover 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 a LifeWiki 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. If a page contains material which infringes copyright, that material – and the whole page, if there is no other material present – should be removed.

Image guidelines

Images and photographs, like written works, are subject to copyright. Images will be assumed to under GDFL unless the user who uploaded the image says otherwise on the image's page. 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 an image to be used irrespective of any copyright claims.

Reusers' rights and obligations

If you want to use LifeWiki materials in your own books/articles/websites or other publications, you can do so -- but only in compliance with the GFDL. If you are simply duplicating the Wikipedia 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:

• your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL,
• you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B), and
• you must provide access to the "transparent copy" of the material (section 4J). (The "transparent copy" of a LifeWiki article is the wiki text, the html web pages, or any other format provided by LifeWiki.)

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the LifeWiki article hosted on this website.

Example notice

An example notice, for an article that uses the LifeWiki article catacryst might read as follows:

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the LifeWiki article "Catacryst".

("Catacryst" and the URLs enclosed in the above must of course be substituted as necessary.)

Alternatively you can distribute your copy of "Catacryst" and list at least five (or all if fewer than five) principal authors on the title page (or top of the document), as explained in the text of the GFDL license. All (re-)distributed documents need to include a copy of the GFDL license text.

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

If you are the owner of content that is being used on LifeWiki without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from LifeWiki; contact Nathaniel Johnston at support@conwaylife.com 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 and replace it with the words {{copyvio|loc=URL or place you published the text}} 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.