Wikipedia:Copyrights
From the Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can change
- See the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) or the Simple English version of the GFDL.
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This page is an official policy on the Simple English Wikipedia. Many people agree with it. They see it as a standard way that all users should follow. When changing the page, please check that the other people agree with your changes. Use the talk page when you are not sure or when you want to propose a change. |
Only add pages that you are sure are allowed under the terms of the GFDL.
Copyright is a law that says people think that something was really made by another person.
Copyright law says that an individual cannot pretend that he or she made something that was really made by another person. Copyright is used for books, movies, songs, and Web pages, including pages on Wikipedias like this Simple English Wikipedia.
Laws about copyright were created so that people who write books or songs or make web pages or movies could get money for their work fairly. For example, when an author writes a good book and wants people to buy it pay money for it, he would not want someone else to sell the book and make a profit from the stolen book. The author also wants people to know that he was the first person who could write a book like that one; if the book is good, it means the author is good at writing and bosses may hire the author to write things for them.
The rule of all the Wikipedias, including this one, is that nothing in the Wikipedia can be copyrighted by someone else, unless Wikipedia editors (including named and unnamed editors) have permission to use it. This means that we are only allowed to copy things from books or from other web pages into the Wikipedia if the writer has said that anyone can copy these things and make changes to them.
[change] Fair use
There is an exception to the rules of copyright, which is called fair use. This says that we can copy a very short amount of something for example, one or two sentences, or a small picture) without permission. Fair use is part of the laws of United States of America and some other countries.
Because people could get very angry at the Wikipedia if we copy the wrong things, it's better not to copy anything onto the Wikipedia unless we are sure it's allowed.
[change] Moving things from other Wikipedias
We can move things from other Wikipedias to here. You may ask yourself "Do I have to say I did this?" There is no easy answer. Under GFDL, you really should, but when a person writes for Wikipedia, they know that their work can be changed because the edit screen tells them their writing will be edited at will.
This means that copying between pages (or projects) is ok. When the changes you make are more than just making the words correct, copyright is not kept; this makes you a co-author.
You can show respect to other people by saying they did this work. You can add interlanguage links which link to the page that you got the information from. You could write on the page where it was from, or write it in your edit summary.
