Template:Legal Nav Wikibon is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. The full text of the license is found here.

Wikibon Content

Text Content

Anyone is free to use the text content of Wikibon.org in websites, articles, or other publications, provided you follow the guidelines of the designated GNU Free Documentation License.

Images and Other Media

Images that are displayed at Wikibon remain the property of their original creators, and are only included on this website for purposes of illustration under fair use guidelines. Unless the original author of the image expressly grants permission, images do not fall under the scope of the Creative Commons License. In all cases, the images must be uploaded to our database, accompanied by a specific note with:

• credit for the original author of the image or other media file (if the file is a -created work) including a link where the original author may be contacted, or
• the original source of the image or other media file.

You must also include information about:

• whether the file is uploaded to Wikibon with express permission of the author, or under fair use rules, and
• the source of the file, being a specific episode, movie, book, other official work, a website, or any other medium.

Contributors' Rights and Obligations

If you contribute material to Wikibon, you thereby agree to grant Wikibon an unlimited license to use that content, and Wikibon agrees to re-license it under the Creative Commons License. In order to contribute, you therefore must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either

• you own the copyright to the material, for instance because you produced it yourself, or
• you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under a Creative Commons or similar license, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under Creative Commons License.

In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials, and agree to have such materials re-licensed by Wikibon, under the Creative Commons License. In the second case, if you incorporate external Creative Commons License materials, as a requirement of the GFDL, you need to acknowledge the authorship and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy.

Using Copyrighted Work from Others

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). It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of Wikibon's material as possible (within the limits of copyright law), so original images and sound files licensed under the Creative Commons License 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 perfectly legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate it in your own words, and submit it to Wikibon.

If You Find a Copyright Infringement

It is not the job of rank-and-file members of Wikibon to police every article for possible copyright infringement, but if you suspect one, you should at the very least bring up the issue in that page's comments section. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed. The most helpful piece of information you can provide is a URL or other reference to what you believe may be the source of the text.

Some cases will be false alarms. For example, if the contributor was in fact the author of the text that is published elsewhere under different terms, that does not affect their right to post it here under the Creative Commons License. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on the Web that was copied from Wikibon. In both of these cases, it is a good idea to make a note in the talk page to discourage such false alarms in the future.

If some of the content of a page really is an infringement, then the infringing content should be removed, and a note to that effect should be made on the comments page, along with the original source. If the author's permission is obtained later, the text can be restored.

If all of the content of a page is a suspected copyright infringement, then the page should be discussed on the Wikibon:Copyright problems page. If, after a week from the date on which the discussion was started, the page still appears to be a copyright infringment, then it may be deleted from the database.

In extreme cases of contributors continuing to post copyrighted material after appropriate warnings, such users may be blocked from editing to protect the project.

Belief of Copyright Infringement

Wikibon requests that in the case that the owner or owners of a copyrighted work feel that their work is being illegally infringed upon, they provide a full list of all items which they believe are infringing, along with the reasoning behind the belief that those items are infringing to Wikibon's Designated agent. In addition, please provide the name of a person, along with their mailing address and e-mail address if possible, for a reply or follow-up letters.