Dokapedia:Copyrights

The text of Dokapedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by Dokapedia editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the public under a single license. Most of Dokapedia's text and many of its images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The license Dokapedia uses grant free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. Dokapedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and acknowledgment of the authors of the Dokapedia article used is included (a link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement; see below for more details). Copied Dokapedia content will therefore remain free under an appropriate license and can continue to be used by anyone subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom. This principle is known as copyleft in contrast to typical copyright licenses.

To this end,
 * Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify Dokapedia's text under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
 * A copy of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License is included in the section entitled "Dokapedia:Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License"
 * Content on Dokapedia is covered by disclaimers.

The English text of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license is the only legally binding restriction between authors and users of Dokapedia content. What follows is our interpretation of CC BY-SA 4.0, as it pertains to the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

Contributors' rights and obligations
If you contribute text or images directly to Dokapedia, you thereby license it to the public for reuse under CC BY-SA 4.0.

If you want to import text that you have found elsewhere or that you have co-authored with others, you can only do so if it is available under terms that are compatible with the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. If you are the sole author of the material, you must license it under CC BY-SA 4.0.

If the material, text or media, has been previously published and you wish to donate it to Dokapedia under appropriate license, you will need to verify copyright permission through one of our established procedures. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials for details. If you are not a copyright holder, you will still need to verify copyright permission; see the Using copyrighted work from others section below.

You retain copyright to materials you contribute to Dokapedia, text and media. Copyright is never transferred to Dokapedia. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract or alter the license for copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain so licensed until they enter the public domain when your copyright expires (currently some decades after an author's death).

Using copyrighted work from others
All creative works are copyrighted, by international agreement, unless either they fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. Generally, Dokapedia must have permission to use copyrighted works. There are some circumstances under which copyrighted works may be legally utilized without permission; see Dokapedia:Content policy for specific details on when and how to utilize such material. However, it is our goal to be able to freely re-distribute as much of Dokapedia's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under CC BY-SA and GFDL (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts) or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use or otherwise.

If you want to import media (including text) that you have found elsewhere, and it does not meet the non-free content policy and guideline, you can only do so if it is public domain or available under terms that are compatible with the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. If you import media under a compatible license which requires attribution, you must, in a reasonable fashion, credit the author(s). You must also in most cases verify that the material is compatibly licensed or public domain. If the original source of publication contains a copyright disclaimer or other indication that the material is free for use, a link to it on the media description page or the article's talk page may satisfy this requirement. If you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under compatible terms, you must make a note of that fact (along with the relevant names and dates) and verify this through one of several processes. See Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission for the procedure for asking a copyright holder to grant a usable license for their work and for the processes for verifying that license has been granted.

Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt Dokapedia. If in doubt, write the content yourself, thereby creating a new copyrighted work which can be included in Dokapedia without trouble.

Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Dokapedia, so long as you do not follow the source too closely. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference (see Wikipedia's plagiarism guideline).

Linking to copyrighted works
Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any Dokapedia 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, Dokapedia is not restricted to linking only to CC BY-SA 4.0 or open-source content.

However, if you know or reasonably suspect 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 (Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry ); cf. GS Media v Sanoma for a landmark case in the European Union. Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on Dokapedia and its editors.

The copyright status of Internet archives in the United States is unclear, however. It is currently acceptable to link to Internet archives such as the Wayback Machine, which hosts unmodified archived copies of webpages taken at various points in time.

In articles about a website, it is acceptable to include a link to that website even if there are possible copyright violations somewhere on the site.

Context is also important; it may be acceptable to link to a reputable website's review of a particular film, even if it presents a still from the film (such uses are generally either explicitly permitted by distributors or allowed under fair use). However, linking directly to the still of the film 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 any 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. Some cases will be false alarms. For example, text that can be found elsewhere on the Web that was in fact copied from Dokapedia in the first place is not a copyright violation on Dokapedia's part.

If a page contains material which infringes copyright, that material – and the whole page, if there is no other material present – should be removed. See w:Wikipedia:Copyright violations for more information, and w:Wikipedia:Copyright problems for detailed instructions.

Guidelines for images and other media files
Images, photographs, video and sound files, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone holds the copyright unless they have explicitly been placed in the public domain. Images, video and sound files 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 them to be used irrespective of any copyright claims; see w:Wikipedia:Non-free content for more.

Image description pages must be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images, as described at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags. Untagged or incorrectly-tagged images will be deleted.

Governing copyright law
Dokapedia is a project of MJL who is based in the United States and accordingly under jurisdiction of by United States law, including copyright law. Additionally, Dokapedia is hosted on servers in the Netherlands and United States by the British non-profit Miraheze Limited

Reusers' rights and obligations
If you want to use other Dokapedia materials in your own books/articles/websites or other publications, you can do so, unless it is used under the non-free content provisions—but only in compliance with the licensing terms. Please follow the guidelines below:

Re-use of content

 * Attribution
 * To re-distribute text or free images on Dokapedia in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including (a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, (b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or (c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.) This applies to text developed by the Dokapedia community.


 * Copyleft/Share Alike
 * If you make modifications or additions to the page you re-use, you must license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License or later.


 * Indicate changes
 * If you make modifications or additions, you must indicate in a reasonable fashion that the original work has been modified. If you are re-using the page in a wiki, for example, indicating this in the page history is sufficient.


 * Licensing notice
 * Each copy or modified version that you distribute must include a licensing notice stating that the work is released under CC BY-SA and either (a) a hyperlink or URL to the text of the license or (b) a copy of the license. For this purpose, a suitable URL is: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

For further information, please refer to the legal code of the CC BY-SA 4.0 License.

Non-free materials and special requirements
Wikipedia articles may also include quotations, images, or other media under the U.S. Copyright law "fair use" doctrine in accordance with our guidelines for non-free content. In Dokapedia, such "fair use" material should be identified as from an external source by an appropriate method (on the image description page, or history page, as appropriate; quotations should be denoted with quotation marks or block quotation). This leads to possible restrictions on the use, outside of Dokapedia, of such "fair use" content retrieved from Wikipedia: this "fair use" content does not fall under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license as such, but under the "fair use" (or similar/different) regulations in the country where the media are retrieved.

Reusing text within Dokapedia
When you merge or split an article, or otherwise move text from one page to another within Dokapedia, the page history functionality cannot by itself determine where the content originally came from. This may violate the attribution clause of the project's licenses. If you are copying text within Dokapedia, you must at least put a link to the source page in an edit summary at the destination page. It is encouraged to do the same thing at the source page, and to add notices at the talk pages of both.

If you reuse text which you created yourself, the above may still be a good idea to avoid confusion, but it isn't mandatory.

Content owners
If you are the owner of content that is being used on Dokapedia without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from Dokapedia by contacting an active Dokapedia administrator. You may also blank the page and replace it with the words 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.

Inversely, if you are the editor of a Dokapedia article and have found a copy hosted without following the licensing requirements for attribution, please see Wikipedia:Standard license violation letter.