MEpedia talk:Copyright policy

Public, Public domain and Used with permission

New section to add to documentation. Feedback welcome. notjusttired (talk) 10:18, August 13, 2019 (EDT)
Images or files freely accessible over the internet (e.g., not in any password protected, private or members only area) are sometimes thought of as being in the public domain. This is not the same as being a public domain image image for copyright purposes, e.g. where the creator/author has explicitly stated that anyone can copy, change or share the content for any purpose at all (as long as they don't try to claim it's theirs), or where certain conditions are met for example the original copyright expired because the author/creator died over 100 years ago. This means that the vast majority of publicly available images and files are not public domain and should not be uploaded to MEpedia.

Can public images by reused?

If you wanted to reuse a 'public' image or file you would need to contact the author/creator and ask about a license, or ask for permission just for use on MEpedia. If a person grants permission only for MEpedia or only to you, you should upload it and pick the license option - remember to display the author name and 'used with permission' in the caption on any articles that use it. This may be useful for things like awareness images, proclamations or photos on Twitter - simply ask for permission to reuse here, and if it's granted then choose then Used with permission. Alternatively, the person might agree to a license allowing anyone to reuse it, or change it, eg Template:CC-by-sa-3.0, which is the standard license for most MEpedia images and files.

All rights reserved

No permission to reuse.

Revisions

Hi Njt, I copied your message from MediaWiki talk:Copyrightwarning here so we could incorporate your input:

There should be a "unless others noted" exception here. We have a significant amount of images either with no license set (mostly through fair use but some might have been uploaded without permission eg from tweets or clipart websites) - plus there's some images under a Non-commercial license from research, plus some public domain images etc. I do this this message could be helpful in pointing editors at what is / is not a reliable source and/or the Manual of Style - which a new anonymous editor recently missed and wanted to rename a page without following that. - notjusttired (talk) 14:59, 16 April 2019 (EDT)

A few thoughts/questions:

• I added the Science guidelines, Editorial guidelines and MOS as "See also", so perhaps that will help people find it more easily, while still keeping this page as succinct as possible.
• I'm not sure I totally understand what you mean about an "unless others noted" exception, do you mind explaining a little more?
• For non-commercial licenses in particular: my understanding is that any commercial restrictions means a license does not satisfy CC-BY-SA and material that is only licensed that way should probably be removed? The issue as I understand it is that the CC license specifically allows everything to be used even commercially, so anything that has restrictions on its commercial re-use can't be incorporated as CC content (which all of MEpedia is). But this isn't my specialty, do you (or others) have different info?

Canele (talk) 16:23, 16 April 2019 (EDT)

Hi User:Canele - Thanks for that. I've only just seen this reply. With licenses, a number of different science articles have been published under Creative Commons 'Non-commercial' or 'No-derivatives' licenses - the license terms say they are totally free to upload, share and reuse but with the extra condition of Non-commercial use and/or only if unmodified (we rarely modify images here abreast). Non-commercial is explained as including charity/non-profit or educational use - so there's no issue with reuse here - but if someone later decided to package the website into an eBook/wikibook and charge for it that would be an issue for those images. It also means that anyone wanting to use them for a different website linked to a business, eg a physio's website or a doctor, or in a paid-for training manual that wouldn't be allowed. We also need to specify on those images what the different license is, eg in the caption plus we already do on the file description page. "No-derivatives" just means don't re-color, use within an image, add your website name, remove or change any part of it. If you click on one of the images with these licenses you can follow the link to the Creative Commons license for more explanation. There's also a small number of "fair usage" images, eg where alternatives wouldn't be possible to find and where only a small part of the original book / article etc is used. This is also a known use for things like book covers on pages where the book is described (not not for other uses). Images of scientists from their websites might also count as fair usage.

So just a note on the image and in the caption where it's used in a page can indicate the "exception" for unusual licenses. I hope that explains more. #MEAction / User:JaimeS have not yet approved this page so things may yet change - if that happens we can simply use license categories to identify the files to remove. notjusttired (talk) 09:19, August 13, 2019 (EDT)

Please add -- ~Njt (talk) 17:50, June 6, 2020 (EDT)

Under See also please add

• Add copyright license

User:Kmdenmark User:JaimeS Thanks ~Njt (talk) 17:50, June 6, 2020 (EDT)

 Done Kmdenmark (talk) 12:53, June 7, 2020 (EDT)