This will eventually hold helpful information for uploading images. For right now though, it's a work in progress with a helpful list of the regular licensing options in the drop-down when you first upload a file along with the templates that the selection would add to the file.
Image Policies
General Copyright Information
Before we get to the meat of our image policies (which are better described as "the way borrowing images on the internet should be for everyone"), let's talk about copyright in general. Copyright is a useful, if occasionally frustrating, tool that we need to work with to talk about to keep certain site issues to a minimum. In the United States of America, whose copyright laws this site is bound to, the creator of a written or graphical works automatically possess copyright for his work. If they made it first, they own it for a period of time. They get to control how their work is used to a very large degree. With a few exceptions, discussed later on, using someone's work without permission can lead to requests for removal of the work, lawyer penned ugly take-down notices, or even law suits.
As we are a volunteer driven community, we don't want to deal with any of that legal crap. Most of our written content is made by our users and licensed to the wiki when they post it, so we don't really need to worry on that front. On the occasion that someone does post something they didn't write, we're pretty good about either securing permission or just deleting it.
Images, on the other hand, are a much larger problem. Most images out there on the internet are owned and copyrighted by someone. And that means that we need to follow copyright guidelines if we want to use them without leaving ourselves open to trouble. If you made the image yourself, you own it and can license it to the wiki (which you do by uploading it) and we don't have to worry about any nasty legal issues. If you didn't make it yourself but copied it from an internet or dead tree source, then you need to use the image properly to save the rest of us a headache.
Using Copyrighted Images
You can use copyrighted images, as long as one of the following four things are true:
- You have permission from the copyright owner / creator.
- The image is in the Public Domain
- The image is licensed under terms that allow others to use it; this may come with additional requirements for use like attribution or non-commercial use and vary with license.
- You're going to put it up under Fair Use.
File Licensing
| Licensing Type (Dropdown Option) |
Associated Template | Required Source Information | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| None Selected | This is the default option, and will not apply a licensing template to the file. It is also not an allowed licensing option on this wiki. Files without licensing information will be deleted. | ||
| I don't know the license | {{No license}} | Web site or published location | As long as you have a source, someone will be able to update the license later on or remove it if it is inappropriate. |
| I took this photo myself | {{self}} | You should understand that you are releasing your image under the CC-BY-SA license, and others will be able to use it with attribution. | |
| I got this from Wikipedia or another Wikimedia project | {{From Wikimedia}} | Wikipedia or Wikimedia address | This licensing option does not include images hosted on other Wikia sites. Those images are licensed just like these are, and you will need to indicate that license and also trace them back to their original source. |
| This is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License | {{CC-BY-SA}} | Web site or published location | |
| This is licensed under another free license | {{Other free}} | Web site or published location | |
| This is in the public domain | {{PD}} | ||
| This will be used in a way that qualifies as fair use under US law | {{Fairuse}} | Web site or published location | Most copyrighted images that are not licensed under a free license will use this licensing option. Please try to avoid uploading large, high resolution images if you select this license, as it may run afoul of the third factor in the fair use test. See Fair Use for more information on this copyright exemption. |
| This is copyrighted, but use is permitted by the copyright holder | {{Permission}} | Web site or published location |