This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Copyright FAQ".

This section gives brief answers to the four most commonly asked questions about copyright on Steel-Wiki, with pointers to other relevant pages. The rest of this page gives a basic overview of copyright law.

You can add any type of content if it has been made available by authors under an appropriate license. It's not enough to have a license that restricts use only to Steel-Wiki or prohibits commercial use; these are treated as if there was no license at all. You can also add content if it is in the public domain.

The absence of a copyright notice does not mean that a work may be freely used. If in doubt, assume you cannot use it.

Only GFDL, CC-BY (or any other text which allows use for any purpose with only attribution), or public domain text can be freely copied onto Steel-Wiki. The GFDL is not compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license or any other copyleft license. If the material you would like to use is not currently licensed compatibly with Steel-Wiki, you may be able to obtain permission to use it.

Under very narrow circumstances, copyrighted images and text can be used without permission under the “fair use” clause of US copyright law. Limited use of copyrighted text, for example, can be done without requiring permission from the rights holders for such things as scholarship and review.

Facts cannot be copyrighted. It is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Steel-Wiki, although the structure, presentation, and phrasing of the information should be your own original creation. The United States Court of Appeals noted in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service that factual compilations of information may be protected with respect to “selection and arrangement, so long as they are made independently by the compiler and entail a minimal degree of creativity,” as ”[t]he compilation author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the collected data so that they may be used effectively by readers.” 1 You can use the facts, but unless they are presented without creativity (such as an alphabetical phone directory), you may need to reorganize as well as restate them to avoid substantial similarity infringement. It can be helpful in this respect to utilize multiple sources, which can provide a greater selection of facts from which to draw.

Only if the image is released under GFDL or a similarly free license. If the image is tagged as Fair use, then most probably you cannot. See the Fair use section for more details.

Steel-Wiki's textual content is copyrighted, but you may reuse it under the terms of our licensing requirements, summarized below.

Text in Steel-Wiki, excluding quotations, has been released under the GNU Free Documentation License (or is in the public domain), and can therefore be reused only if you release any derived work under the GFDL. This requires that, among other things, you attribute the authors and allow others to freely copy your work. (This is a summary, see the licence text for the exact details.)

If you are unwilling or unable to use the GFDL for your work, use of Steel-Wiki content is unauthorized. Small quotations of Steel-Wiki content, with its source attributed, may be permissible under the “fair use” clause of US copyright law. See Cite this Article for information about the proper citation of articles. No permission is needed to create a hyperlink to Steel-Wiki or its articles.

Images used in Steel-Wiki may have their own, completely independent licensing scheme. Looking at an image's description page by clicking on the image itself should ideally tell you the copyright status of the image. Many images are either in the public domain or licensed under copyleft licenses (such as the GFDL), but many are copyrighted and used on Wikipedia under the “fair use” clause of US copyright law.

We take this very seriously. We try hard to keep copyright violations out of Steel-Wiki, but we don't always succeed. Please contact us at Steel-Wiki@Steel-Link.com to report a possible copyright violation on Steel-Wiki.

Copyright is the right that the producer of a creative work has been granted to prevent others from copying it. Unlike a patent, however, in most places (i.e., countries) you don't have to apply for a copyright - you get one automatically every time you produce creative work.

A creative work can be almost anything - a book, a song, a picture, a photograph, a poem, a phrase, or a fictional character. In the US, buildings built on or after December 1, 1990 are also eligible for copyright. ¹⁾

Licenses may be granted to others, giving them the right to copy the work subject to certain conditions. A license is similar to a contract - the work may only be copied under the conditions given by the copyright holder or if one of the other exceptions to the copy right applies.

Copyright laws vary between countries; the relevant US law is Title 17.²⁾ The Berne convention is a comprehensive international agreement on copyrights which is part of the copyright law of many nations.³⁾

Copyright does not protect against all possible copying: both US law and the Berne Convention limit copyright scope and enable much copying without permission even if the copyright holder objects. Specifically, broadcast and piano roll rights are specifically granted, with an automatic license fee, managed and collected by such organizations as BMI, ASCAP and BPI. In the US fair use (in the UK, fair dealing) is explicitly permitted as well, as is the right to sell a licensed copy of a copyrighted work, such as a video tape or sound recording. Also, both the Berne Convention and US law require that a work have some original creativity to be eligible for a copyright monopoly. Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service contains some examples of US decisions about what is and isn't original, including examples such as typo correction.

“Copyright is a temporary monopoly granted by the government – it creates the legal fiction that a piece of writing or composing … is property and can only be sold by those who have been licensed to do so by the copyright holder”. – Orson Scott Card Note that it is limited to the form of expression, not to the ideas. Thus, a book by Agatha Christie is likely to be copyrighted, but a book about a detective with an accent and odd personal mannerisms would not be, nor would a story about someone claiming to be the premier consulting detective in a major city be a violation of the Conan Doyle copyrights on Sherlock Holmes stories. Ideas and facts are not copyrightable in most places, only the form of expression of them.

A work which is not copyrighted is in the public domain, and may be freely copied by anyone. It may have been placed in the public domain by its creator, it may be ineligible for copyright (not original enough or otherwise excluded), or the copyright may have expired: in the United States for example, almost all works published prior to 1923 are public domain because their copyright term expired and in the UK and much of Europe, all musical recordings are in the public domain 50 years after release. (In the United States special laws have been passed to extend copyright for certain works beyond the normal term.) See also List of countries' copyright length.

All work produced by employees of the US federal government as part of their work is public domain—thus, much of the content found on US government websites (.gov and .mil) is public domain. However, the government frequently includes works on its websites which are copyrighted by someone else, and the US government can even own copyright on works which are produced by others. In other words, some US Federal websites can include works which are not in the public domain–check the copyright status before assuming something is public domain. Note also that this applies only to the US Federal government. Most state governments retain the copyright on their work (California being a notable exception).

Works produced by the UK government are not public domain; they are covered by Crown copyright.

Seeing something on the Internet without a copyright notice does not mean that it is in the public domain. Only two countries, Uruguay and Paraguay, currently require copyright notices for a work to be covered by copyright.

If public domain work is included in a copyrighted product the new product is not public domain. The portions of the new copyrighted work that are from a public domain source may be removed and copied without permission. For example when a public domain text is included in a Steel-Wiki article the tags and any additional text are still under the GFDL.

A derivative work is something that is “based on and a close copy of” another work. For example, the Harry Potter movies are derivative works of the Harry Potter books. Therefore, Warner Bros. required J.K. Rowling's permission to make and distribute the films.

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 abridgement and not a summary.

Taking a work in the public domain and modifying it in a significant way creates a new copyright on the work. For instance, the Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card is a re-telling of the Book of Mormon. Therefore, the books in the Homecoming series can be copyrighted.

However, the new work must be different from the original in order for a new copyright to apply, as the court ruled in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corporation.

The Bridgeman Art Library had made photographic reproductions of famous works of art from museums around the world (works already in the public domain.) The Corel Corporation used those reproductions for an educational CD-ROM without paying Bridgeman. Bridgeman claimed copyright infringement. The Court ruled that reproductions of images in the public domain are not protected by copyright if the reproductions are slavish or lacking in originality. In their opinion, the Court noted: “There is little doubt that many photographs, probably the overwhelming majority, reflect at least the modest amount of originality required for copyright protection…. But 'slavish copying', although doubtless requiring technical skill and effort, does not qualify.” 2

This ruling only applies to two-dimension works. For pictures of statues (which is, effectively, a translation of a three dimensional work into a two-dimensional copy) the picture taker has creative input into which angle to take the photographs from. Therefore, a new copyright is created when the picture is taken. Therefore, pictures of public domain 3D works are not free unless it was created by the uploader. In addition, in some countries such as the United Kingdom, simple dilligence is enough for a work to be copyrightable (including reproductions of public domain works). The position of the Wikimedia Foundation on this however, is that any reproduction of a two-dimensional work in the public domain is not copyrightable, and that this defeats the purpose of a public domain.

Pictures of copyrighted buildings are not considered derivative works, unless the country it is photographed does not have freedom of panorama provisions (such as France). In United States copyright law though, “The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work – but only if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.”⁴⁾

Under certain conditions, you may copy 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.

Generally, fair use exceptions are ill-defined, and vary widely from country to country. What is fair use in one country may not be in another country.

Under US copyright law, the primary things to consider when asking if something is fair use (set forth in Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107) are:⁵⁾

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.

Asking yourself these questions might help you determine if something is fair use:

1. Is it a for profit competitor or not? Is it for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research? Is the use transformative (of a different nature to the original publication)?
2. Is it a highly original creative work with lots of novel ideas or a relatively unoriginal work or listing of facts? Is the work published (to a non-restricted audience)? If not, fair use is much less likely.
3. How much of the original work are you copying? Are you copying more or less than the minimum required for your purpose? The more you exceed this minimum, the less likely the use is to be fair. Are you reducing the quality or originality, perhaps by using a reduced size version?
4. Does this use hurt or help the original author's ability to sell it? Did they intend to or were they trying to make the work widely republished (as with a press release)? Are you making it easy to find and buy the work if a viewer is interested in doing so?

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 Cases⁶⁾
• Giglaw - What is “Fair Use” in Copyright Law⁷⁾
• Nolo law center - When Copying Is Okay: The “Fair Use” Rule⁸⁾