The wiki takes copyright seriously. People copyright things because they want to make their living from the creative process that made the thing. We are all about creativity.
In order to talk about creativity we sometimes want to show a part of the thing created. That is cool. It is called Fair Use. In order to make the use fair, we have to follow some rules. The big one that makes the rest of the little ones easy to remember is:
You can only show an excerpt, not the whole thing.
Permission from the copyright holder:
- Permission from the copyright holder (in the case of an image, that's most likely going to be the artist themselves) means that we can use the image, as long as we comply with any restrictions they put on that usage without threading the maze of Fair Use. Such restrictions may be "Don't crop or alter it", "Link it back to my webpage", or "Give me a credit in the caption." That permission was granted should be noted in a commented-out note (something like "%% Used by permission of the artist as long as it's linked to <website address> %%") on the page in question.
Copyright symbols
- If there is a copyright symbol © but no name on the part of work shown, it needs to be made clear that there is more of the work, or it looks like we're claiming the copyright, which would be bad.
- If there is a copyright symbol © with or without a name, on the work shown, and there isn't any more to that work — a single-panel comic, for example — we can't use it at all. It is not an excerpt. It is the whole thing.
- If there is a copyright symbol © with or without a name on the work, we can't simply remove it. That wouldn't be honest, or fair. We can show a part of the work that doesn't have the copyright symbol, though, and it is preferable to do so. Just clipping off and showing the part of an image that doesn't have the symbol is not an excerpt.
- The absence of an © symbol does not mean the work isn't copyrighted! In most First World countries (and we're hosted in one), a work becomes copyrighted automatically when it's created and remains so unless it's old enough to be in the Public Domain, has been purposely released to the public domain, or has been released under a "copyleft" license such as Creative Commons
.
Watermarks
- A watermark is any printing or image deliberately overlaid across the image in order to interfere with seeing it completely clearly. It's an anti-theft measure. We can't use it. Period. This is a watermarked image: Note
We used the photo with permission and watermarked it ourselves to demonstrate what a watermark looks like.
Bugs
- TV channels use bugs mostly for marketing purposes rather than as an anti-theft measure. A single screencap from a show is Fair Use, and an image with a bug in the corner is acceptable, although one without it is preferable, because it's prettier. This image has a bug (circled):
Other
Sometimes an image has no copyright symbol, but is still copyrighted. This happens a lot with still photography. The photo is the entirety of the work, not an excerpt. If you
know the image is copyrighted, don't use it.
Hopefully that clears up questions about how and when we can show parts of works. If you have further questions, post the question in the Wiki Talk Forum. If you see a page image that you think violates these guidelines, make a thread for it in the Image Pickin' forum. Just click the 'forums' button at the top of the page, then select the forum you want.
