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The text of artiFact is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by artiFact editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the public under one or several liberal licenses. Most of artiFact’s text and many of its images are co-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Some text has been imported only under CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA-compatible license and cannot be reused under GFDL
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FAIR USE NOTICE
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. artiFact have made this material available for educational purposes, to benefit those with an interest in these areas. We believe this constitutes ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, material on this site is made available without profit to parties interested in it for research and educational purposes.
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Please cite the reference and your claim as the copyright holder. Please note that just because material is published on a website this does not automatically affirm copyright ownership.
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Contributors’ rights and obligations
If you contribute text directly to artiFact, you thereby license it to the public for reuse under CC-BY-SA and GFDL (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Non-text media may be contributed under a variety of different licenses that support the general goal of allowing unrestricted re-use and re-distribution. See Guidelines for images and other media files, below.
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 license. You do not need to ensure or guarantee that the imported text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License, unless you are its sole author. Furthermore, please note that you cannot import information which is available only under the GFDL. In other words, you may only import text that is (a) single-licensed under terms compatible with the CC-BY-SA license or (b) dual-licensed with the GFDL and another license with terms compatible with the CC-BY-SA license. If you are the sole author of the material, you must license it under both CC-BY-SA and GFDL.
If the material, text or media, has been previously published and you wish to donate it to artiFact under appropriate license, you will need to verify copyright permission through one of our established procedures. See artiFact: 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.
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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, artiFact must have permission to use copyrighted works. There are some circumstances under which copyrighted works may be legally utilized without permission; see artiFact: Non-free content for specific details on when and how to utilize such material. However, it is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of artiFact’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 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 artiFact: 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 artiFact. If in doubt, write the content yourself, thereby creating a new copyrighted work which can be included in artiFact 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 artiFact, 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.
Linking to copyrighted works
Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any artiFact 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, artiFact is not restricted to linking only to CC-BY-SA 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). Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else’s work sheds a bad light on artiFact 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 host 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
See also: artiFact: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 artiFact in the first place is not a copyright violation on artiFact’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.
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.
Image description pages must be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images. Untagged or incorrectly-tagged images will be deleted.
Questions about media copyright may be directed to artiFact:Media copyright questions, which is generally staffed by volunteers familiar with artiFact’s media copyright guidelines and policies.
Governing copyright law
The artiFact Foundation is hosted in the United States and accordingly governed by United States copyright law. Regardless, according to Paul Tranter, the founder of artiFact, artiFact contributors should respect the copyright law of other nations, even if these do not have official copyright relations with the United States.
Works by the United States Federal Government
Works produced by civilian and military employees of the United States federal government in the scope of their employment are public domain by statute in the United States (though they may be protected by copyright outside the U.S.). It is not enough that the employee was working at the time; he/she must have made the work as part of his/her duties (e.g. a soldier who takes a photograph with his/her personal camera while on patrol in Iraq owns the copyright to the photo, but it may find its way onto a unit webpage or otherwise be licensed to the government).
However, not every work republished by the U.S. government falls into this category. The U.S. government can own copyrights that are assigned to it by others – for example, works created by contractors.
Reusers’ rights and obligations
The only artiFact content you should contact the artifact Foundation about is the trademarked artiFact logos, which are not freely usable without permission (members of the media see artiFact: Contact us). If you want to use other artiFact 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 text
Attribution
To re-distribute text on artiFact 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 artiFact community. Text from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which should be indicated on an article’s face or on its talk page. For example, a page may have a banner or other notation indicating that some or all of its content was originally published somewhere else. Where such notations are visible in the page itself, they should generally be preserved by re-users.
Copyleft/Share Alike
If you make modifications or additions to the page you re-use, you must license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 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: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
For further information, please refer to the legal code of the CC-BY-SA License.
Additional availability of text under the GNU Free Documentation License
For compatibility reasons, any page which does not incorporate text that is exclusively available under CC-BY-SA or a CC-BY-SA-compatible license is also available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. In order to determine whether a page is available under the GFDL, review the page footer, page history, and discussion page for attribution of single-licensed content that is not GFDL-compatible. Since all text published before June 15th, 2009 on artiFact was released under the GFDL, you can ensure GFDL compatibility by using the page history to retrieve content published before that date.
Re-use of non-text media
Where not otherwise noted, non-text media files are available under various free culture licenses, consistent with the Wikimedia Foundation Licensing Policy. Please view the media description page for details about the license of any specific media file.
Non-free materials and special requirements
artiFact 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 artiFact, 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 in accordance with artiFact’s manual of style). This leads to possible restrictions on the use, outside of artiFact, of such “fair use” content retrieved from artiFact: this “fair use” content does not fall under the CC-BY-SA or GFDL license as such, but under the “fair use” (or similar/different) regulations in the country where the media are retrieved.
If you are the owner of content that is being used on artiFact without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from artiFact; see Request for immediate removal of copyright violation. You can also contact our designated agent to have it permanently removed (but it may take up to a week for the page to be deleted that way). Either way, we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.
