Important note: StoopidWiki does not own a copyright on StoopidWiki story texts and illustrations. It is therefore unnecessary to email us for permission to reproduce or reuse content. Reproducing content under the license and technical conditions applicable to StoopidWiki (see below) is granted to everyone without request. You must contact the volunteer authors of the content in question if you wish to seek permission outside these terms.
StoopidWiki uses the licenses that grant free access to our content in a way that free software is freely licensed. This is known as copyleft. It means that, StoopidWiki content can be redistributed, copied and/or modified so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the StoopidWiki story used (a direct link to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). StoopidWiki stories shall remain freely available under the GFDL and may be used by anyone subject to some restrictions, the majority of which serve to uphold that freedom.
To fulfill the above goals, the text contained in StoopidWiki is copyrighted (automatically under the Berne Convention) by StoopidWiki contributors and licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This license's full text can be found at Text of the GNU Free Documentation License.
The English text version of the GFDL is the legally binding document; what follows is our interpretation of the GFDL: the rights and obligations of users and contributors.
IMPORTANT: If you wish to reuse StoopidWiki content, read the Reusers' rights and obligations section, first. You then should read the GNU Free Documentation License.
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Choosing to contribute material to StoopidWiki, means you are thereby licensing your content to the public under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). You must be in a position to grant this license,if you want to contribute. This means that:
You retain the copyright to your materials. You are able to republish and relicense your materials any way you wish. You may never, however, retract the GFDL license. The content that you put on StoopidWiki will remain under GFDL until they enter the public domain.
If you incorporate external GFDL materials, as a requirement of the GFDL, you must acknowledged authorship provide and a link to the location of the original copy.
All works are copyrighted unless either they fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. If you use part of a copyrighted work under "fair use", or if you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of our license, you must make a note of that fact (along with names and dates). Our goal is to freely redistribute as much of StoopidWiki's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the GFDL or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use.
Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt the project. If in doubt, write it yourself.
Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read a story, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to StoopidWiki. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference. See plagiarism and fair use for discussions of how much reformulation is necessary in a general context.
Most recently created materials and works hold a copyright. StoopidWiki content which cites its sources links to copyrighted material. Linking to copyrighted material does not require the copyright holders permission, nor does an author of a book need permission to cite someone else's work in their bibliography. In that way, StoopidWiki is not restricted to linking only to open-source or GFDL-free content.
If you know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of a copyright, don't link to the work. 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 [1]). In the USA, the copyright status of Internet archives is not clear. however. It is alright at this time to link to Internet archives like the Wayback Machine.
Repeatedly posting copyrighted material despite appropriate warnings may result in a contributor being blocked from editing to prevent additional problems.
If you suspect a copyright violation, bring the issue to that page's discussion page. Other users will be able to examine the material(s) and take action if required. Please note that text which can be found elsewhere on the Net that was copied from StoopidWiki is not a copyright violation on StoopidWiki's part.
A page containing material that infringes on a copyright,should be removed if there is no other material present.
Images and photographs mat be have a copyright. The copyright is owned by someone unless they have explicitly placedthe material in the public domain. Images on the web must be licensed straight from the copyright holder or a person or entity able to license on their behalf. Fair use guidelines may allow a photograph to be used in some cases.
Tag image description pages with a special tag in order to note the legal status of the images. To tag the image, choose the correct license from the License drop-down list if you are uploading an image using the "Upload File" link. Incorrectly tagged, or untagged images will be removed. It is not clear just what will transpire in cases where there are duplicate images and those images contain different respective copyright statements.
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 of the U.S.).
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.
Moreover, images and other media found on .mil and .gov websites may be using commercial stock photography owned by others. It may be useful to check the privacy and security notice of the website, but only with an email to the webmaster can you be confident that an image is in the public domain.
It should also be noted that governments outside the U.S. often do claim copyright over works produced by their employees (for example, Crown copyright in the United Kingdom). Also, most state and local governments in the United States do not place their work into the public domain and do in fact own the copyright to their work. Please be careful to check copyright information before copying.
United States Code; Title 17; Chapter 1; ยง 105 Subject matter of copyright; United States Government works.
Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.
The Writers Copyright Association as well as the UK Copyright service has a good summary. The legal basis is the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, and subsequent modifications and revisions, details at Jenkins IP In particular for literary, artistic works, copyright ends 70 years after the last surviving author dies or if unknown, 70 years after creation or publication.
The UK Office of Public Sector Information, formerly HMSO, has said that:
If you want to use StoopidWiki materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GFDL. If you are simply duplicating the StoopidWiki story, you must follow section two of the GFDL on verbatim copying.
If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails the following:
You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the StoopidWiki story hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that StoopidWiki makes no guarantee to retain authorship information and a transparent copy of articles. Therefore, you are encouraged to provide this authorship information and a transparent copy with your derived works.
An example notice, for an article that uses the StoopidWiki story BBQ Season might read as follows:
("BBQ Season" and the URLs enclosed in the above must of course be substituted as necessary.)
Alternatively you can distribute your copy of "BBQ Season" and list at least five (or all if fewer than five) principal authors on the title page (or top of the document), as explained in the text of the GFDL license. The external Page History Stats tool can help you identify the principal authors. All (re-)distributed documents need to include a copy of the GFDL license text.
All original StoopidWiki text is distributed under the GFDL. StoopidWiki stories may also include quotations, images, or other media under the U.S. Copyright law "fair use" doctrine. It is preferred that these be obtained under the most free content license practical (such as the GFDL or public domain).
In StoopidWiki, such "fair use" material should be identified as from an external source (on the image description page, or history page, as appropriate). This also leads to possible restrictions on the use, outside of StoopidWiki, of such "fair use" content retrieved from StoopidWiki: this "fair use" content does not fall under the 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 StoopidWiki without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from StoopidWiki by emailing us at contact@stoopidwiki.com. You can also email us to request to have it permanently removed (but it may take up to a week for the page to be deleted that way). You may also blank the page and replace it with the words {{copyvio|URL or place you published the text}} but the text will still be in the page history. Either way, we will need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.