RabbitWiki:Copyrights
From RabbitWiki
Note: This is a proposed policy for the wiki. Feel free to discuss it on the discussion page. If it meets general acceptance, then we will ask anyone who has submitted content to the wiki to acknowledge this policy and agree that any and all of their contributions can be put under an acceptable license, and any contributions for which we either cannot contact the author of or the author does not agree to the policy, will be deleted off the wiki or moved into the author's private space, as described below.
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[edit] Preface
A wiki is a resource which is shared by, and contributed to by, many people from around the world. The basic idea is that anyone can edit any part of it, at any time they want. Because of this, the traditional protections of copyright do not make much sense. In most countries, which adhere to the Berne Convention on copyright, full copyright protections apply automatically to any written or artistic works, which in the case of a wiki would be quite unfortunate. Copyright protections would prevent anyone other than the original author from copying (downloading, printing, etc) or modifying the article, without explicit permission. It would be a real hassle to require explicit permission for every single edit to every article, and the Rabbit Wiki is designed to be a resource that anyone can use, so instead, we require all contributions submitted to be under a license that allows copying and editing.
[edit] Contributing to the Wiki
All contributions, including creation of articles, textual edits, uploads of images, sound, or other files, modification of uploaded files, and so on, that occur outside of a given user's namespace, must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (cc-by-sa) license. This license gives anyone permission to copy, edit, and create derivative works from your content, for either commercial or non-commercial purposes, as long as any versions, modified, unmodified, or as a derivative work, are distributed under the same license, and you are given proper credit. This means that someone could take your work, change it, and sell it for a profit, as long as they give you credit and give you the right to take their work, change it, and sell that, or any other combination of those rights.
This does not mean that you lose the copyright to your work. You still own the copyright, you are just giving anyone in the world a right to use your work in a certain set of ways, as long as they reciprocate by allowing you to use any work of theirs which is based on yours. If you want to sell your work to a publisher later, that's perfectly fine, there's nothing stopping you from making it available under different licenses. The only requirement is that anything you submit to the Rabbit Wiki be available under the cc-by-sa license.
[edit] Exceptions
There are two exceptions to the normal copyright policy; file uploads, and user pages. These may be submitted under a wider range of licenses, for added flexibility.
[edit] Files
File uploads may be under any license that allows modification and commercial use, which could include a variety of licenses, including excerpts from larger works that may be included in other works under the doctrine of fair use. If the file is not an original work created by the submitter and licensed under the default cc-by-sa license, then the submitter must provide information about the licensing of the file, including who originally created it, what license it is under, or if it in the public domain or used under the doctrine of fair use.
[edit] User pages
A user page, and any pages filed hierarchically under a user page, may be contributed with rights reserved to the user in question, rather than being licensed under the cc-by-sa license. For example, User:Jeep belongs to Jeep and may only be edit by him and anyone he gives explicit permission to. Likewise, User:Jeep/Cool New Game would also belong solely to Jeep, with no license granted other than the implicit license on anything posted publicly to read and use it for personal purposes.
This allows each user to have their own, personal, corner of the wiki, that they can post materials not meant to be licensed openly, while allowing the bulk of the wiki to be licensed openly with no confusion. This does not cover discussion pages on pages within each user's space; those are still open for anyone to post on, licensed under the cc-by-sa license like the rest of the wiki, so user pages can be discussed by everyone. Also, files cannot be submitted under a particular user's space; if you want files under a non-free license, you must host them yourself on your own domain and link to them.
[edit] Don't steal work
Please remember that all content submitted to the wiki must be created by the person submitting, who agrees to license it as the wiki requires, or licensed under a license compatible with cc-by-sa, or in the public domain, or must be submitted under the fair use doctrine (short quotes from books, etc). A compatible license would be anything that would allow a work to be redistributed under the cc-by-sa license; for example, a BSD style license, a cc-by license, a public domain declaration, etc. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask, and if you believe that someone may have violated these rules, please let an admin know.
[edit] For more information
Our copyright policy is modelled on Wikipedia's copyright policy, with some differences; the main copyright is the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, rather than the GNU Free Documentation License, and pages within a given user's user page space may be licensed under more restrictive license. If you have any confusion, it may be helpful to read the FAQs, guidelines, and other information on Wikipedia's copyright page, keeping the differences in mind.
