Basilicus
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Please see Wikia:Licensing for details of the licensing on this wiki.
Warning! Information below may be outdated or incorrect.

The license Basilicus uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, Basilicus 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 Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Basilicus articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom.

To fulfill the above goals, the text contained in Basilicus is licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).

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.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
Content on Basilicus is covered by disclaimers.

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 Basilicus, first read the Users' rights and obligations section. You should then read the GNU Free Documentation License.

Users' rights and obligations[]

If you want to use Basilicus 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 Basilicus 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 Basilicus article is any of a number of formats available from us, including the wiki text, the html web pages, xml feed, etc.)

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the Basilicus article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that the Wikimedia Foundation 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.

Image guidelines[]

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, however this is discouraged in Basilicus, because it invites the possibility of incorporating it into commercial use or some other illegal format.

U.S. government photographs[]

Works produced by civilian and military employees of the United States federal government in the scope of their employment are public domain by statute. However, note that, despite popular misconception, the U.S. Federal Government can own copyrights that are assigned to it by others (for example, works created by contractors). Be careful, however: not all images on .mil and .gov websites are public domain. Among other reasons, the site may be using commercial stock photography owned by others. It may be useful to check the privacy and security notice of the website, but only with an email to the webmaster can you be confident that an image is in the public domain. It should also be noted that governments outside the U.S. often do claim copyright over works produced by their employees (for example, Crown Copyright in the United Kingdom). Also, most state and local governments in the United States do not place their work into the public domain and do in fact own the copyright to their work. Please be careful to check ownership information before copying.

Celebrity photographs[]

This is based on the image guidelines at IMDB, so it especially applies to celebrity photographs, but also can apply to other pictures. Legitimate photographs generally come from three different places with permission.

  1. The studios, producers, magazine publisher, or media outlet that originally shot the photograph.
  2. Agencies that represent the photographers who shot the photos or the photographer themself (the latter especially for amateur photographs)
  3. Submissions from the celebrity himself or herself or a legal representative of the celebrity.

Public Figures and Organizations[]

It is illegal in the United States to use the names of living people in fiction without the permission of that person whether or not the material is favorable. The exception is if the person is a public figure and/or and what was said was on public record. Additionally, if the person is dead and the fiction does not invade the privacy of living relatives, then they can be used. Even if legal, it is important to consider if the fiction can be considered slander. As a general rule of thumb, articles should on Baslicus should not use real people, unless their permission is boldly expressed in writing for their name to be used in the public domain.

Names of organizations, trade names, and brand names may be used in fiction if they are not done in a derogatory light. This is, of course subjective, so if there is ever a question, the organization should not be used.

Using copyrighted work from others[]

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 Basilicus'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 perfectly legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate it in your own words, and submit it to Basilicus. (See plagiarism and fair use for discussions of how much reformulation is necessary in a general context.)

Linking to copyrighted works[]

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.

If you find a copyright infringement[]

It is not the job of rank-and-file Basilicans 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 Wikipedia. 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.

In extreme cases of contributors continuing to post copyrighted material after appropriate warnings, such users may be blocked from editing to protect the project.

--This article is licensed under GNU FDL and uses material from "Wikipedia:Copyrights." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 17 Dec 2005, 18:59 UTC. 19 Dec 2005, 04:24 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights>.

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