Sunshine Review:Copyright Notice

From Sunshine Review

Important note: Sunshine Review and the Sam Adams Alliance do not own copyright on Sunshine Review article texts and illustrations. It is therefore useless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce content. Permission to reproduce content under the license and technical conditions applicable to Sunshine Review has already been granted to everyone without request; for permission to use it outside these terms, one must contact all the volunteer authors of the text or illustration in question. Also a large portion of this text is based on Wikipedia's Copyright Notice.

The license Sunshine Review uses grants free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. Sunshine Review 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 Sunshine Review article used (a direct link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement). Sunshine Review articles therefore will remain free under the GFDL and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom.

To this end, the text contained in Sunshine Review is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by Sunshine Review contributors and licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at Text of the GNU Free Documentation License.

[edit] Contributor's rights and obligations

Once you contribute information to Sunshine Review, you have authorized that work be published under a GFDL. In order to contribute this information keep in mind:

• You must hold the copyright to the material (you are the original author) If you later decided to repost information that you originally authored on this site you will still own the original copyright. However it was also fall under the GFDL license as well.
• The information you are posting is also under a GFDL license. In this case, you must acknowledge the original author's work by providing a link back to the network location.

[edit] Using copyrighted work

Don't do it.

This bears repeating: never use or infringe upon copyrighted material. This is a legal liability for the user and for Sunshine Review.

[edit] So I can't repeat facts?

Copyright applies only to the expression of ideas, not to the factual information itself. Users are welcome to reformulate facts or concepts in their own words.

[edit] Can I still link to it?

Of course. All copyrighted material is available for use as a source. We would caution against using sites that are illegally re-posting copyrighted material -- for example, posting books online without permission -- as this will shed a bad light on this project and its editors.

[edit] Fair Use

Under certain conditions, you may reprint or use a copyrighted work without a license from the original author. One of these limitations on the rights granted to the copyright holder is called "fair use." A more restricted version called fair dealing generally applies outside the United States.

Under US copyright law, the primary things to consider when considering whether something is fair use (set forth in Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107) are:^[1]

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

None of these factors alone is sufficient to make a use fair or not fair - all of them must be considered and weighed. It's routine for courts to express degrees of acceptability or unacceptability for each factor and try to come to a summary and conclusion based on the balance.

Quotations are very well known and widely used form of fair use and fair dealing and are explicitly allowed under the Berne convention.

If you produce a derivative work based on fair use, your work is a fair use work. Even if you release your changes into the public domain, the original work and fair use of it remains and the net effect is fair use. To eliminate this you must make the use of the original so insubstantial that the portion used is insufficient to be covered by copyright.

It is possible for a work to be both licensed and fair use. You may have a license which applies in one country or for one use and may make fair use in other cases. The licenses help to reduce the legal risk, by providing some assurance that there won't be legal action for the uses they cover. It's often wise to ask for a license, even a restrictive license, even if you are sure that your use is fair.

• Stanford University Library - Summaries of Fair Use Cases^[2]
• Giglaw - What is "Fair Use" in Copyright Law^[3]
• Nolo law center - When Copying Is Okay: The "Fair Use" Rule^[4]

[edit] Copyright violations

See also: Sunshine Review copyright violations policy

Those who choose to repeatedly post copyrighted information will be blocked from the site.

Those who believe they've spotted a copyright violation should alert us immediately by e-mail at [mail to:Kristinpedia@sunshinereview.org]. Next you should move the issue on the discussion page of that article. If you are positive a page contains copyrighted material remove the material, or page, in its entirety.

[edit] Public Domain

Public Domain means that the work is not copyrighted and may be freely copied.

[edit] Government websites

All work produced by employees of the US federal government is public domain. Most of the work produced on their websites (.gov & .mil) is public domain as well. Frequently the government website will include copyrighted works by someone else so make sure to check the author's copyright status before using any of this information on the wiki.

• Most state governments (California is the exception) retain copyright on their work.

[edit] Derivative works

A derivative work is something that is "based on and a close copy of" another work. You may not distribute a derivative work without the original author's permission unless you're using one of the rights they weren't granted (like fair use or fair dealing). Generally, a summary (or analysis) of something is not a derivative work, unless it reproduces the original in great detail, at which point it becomes an abridgment and not a summary.

[edit] Licenses

A license is a permission to use copyrighted works in a certain way. Below are some of the more common licenses Sunshine Review users may run into.

[edit] Copyleft & GFDL

Some licenses are called "copyleft" licenses. Essentially, they have three key properties:

• A work licensed with a copyleft license can be copied at will.
• All published derivative works must use exactly the same license as the original: if you use the work, you're forced to use the same license for your own original work as well.
• If your work is using a different license, you can't use the copyleft license, even if your work is also using a (different) copyleft license.

[edit] GFDL

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) is a copyleft license produced by the Free Software Foundation.

What this means when you copy work from Wikipedia?

• It means you must disclose when copying any text from Wikipedia or other niche wikis.

• Example: If you copy a list of external links or an introductory sentence from Wikipedia it must be linked back to along with a confirmation that you took it from Wikipedia.
• Example of appropriate disclosure statement: Portions of this article were taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under the GNU license on 3/19/09.

[edit] Educational

It is very common for scientific works to allow educational use. What each publisher considers to be educational varies. Some consider only schools and colleges to be educational, others include all forms of public education, including encyclopedias, to be educational.

[edit] Creative Commons

"Creative Commons License" (CCL) may refer to one of several licenses written by Creative Commons. Most of the CCLs allow non-commercial distribution of the work if it's unmodified, but different ones allow different combinations of various features:

• Requiring attribution.
• Noncommercial (disallowing commercial reuse).
• No Derivative Works (prohibiting someone from distributing a derivative work).
• Share Alike (copyleft) (requiring someone to distribute their derivative work under the same license).
• Some of the deprecated licenses still apply full copyright to people in developed countries (Developing Nations Licence), or don't permit distribution of the whole work (Sampling License)

[edit] Commercial

There are many different kinds of non-commercial licenses, but generally they say something like You may use, copy, or distribute this work for non-commercial purposes.

Example: "Images contributed to this database by the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes without asking permission from the COC or paying copyright royalty"

A typical commercial license is written to prohibit redistribution and limit the rights of the licensee as far as practical while still allowing them to make some use of the work. While any license is better than no license, these are often very restrictive.

Sunshine Review is a non-commercial project.

[edit] Permissive

An attribution license is a permissive license with an additional requirement of attribution of previous authors' works in any derivative work. An attribution licenses says (essentially): "You may use, copy, or distribute this work, as long as you give credit to the original author." The original "four clause" BSD license is an example of an attribution license.

[edit] Image guidelines

Images and photographs, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone holds the copyright 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 an image to be used irrespective of any copyright claims.

[edit] References

Large portions of text were directly copied from Wikipedia's Copyright Policy, 3/24/2009.