User:Tigraan/Wikipedia copyright inquiries

If I have pointed you at this page, chances are that you:

1. Have taken a photograph, or otherwise produced a work protected by copyright; and
2. I would like to use it on "Wikipedia"; and
3. I think I am not allowed to do it without asking you.

That page explains why I have asked you to do something apparently pointless (such as filling out a form or changing your website or tweeting something). If you want your work to appear on Wikipedia, read on.

What’s that "work" thing?

A "work" is a piece of media that is susceptible of copyright protection. The threshold for "susceptible of copyright protection" is extremely low in most countries.

It usually means "original", but that is a rather low bar. An list of the names of past British prime ministers, ordered alphabetically or chronologically, would not qualify. The list of "British prime ministers, from best hairline to worst hairline" (or any other silly subjective criterion) would possibly qualify.

It does not have to be taken as part of a paid job. An accountant posting pictures of their vacation holds the copyright to these pictures, even if they are not and never will be a professional photographer.

It does not have to be artistically interesting or well-executed. If you take a shaky and poorly-lit video of your niece’s fifth birthday, that is protected by copyright. If a ten-year-old writes a terrible Harry Potter fanfiction riddled with syntax errors and nothing resembling a plot, it is protected by copyright.

I do not care about copyright. Could you do whatever you want with my work and stop bothering me?

You might think, looking around the internet, that pictures, sounds, videos etc. found on the internet can be freely reused. After all, everyone is sharing pictures on social media etc. But legally, many of these uses are copyright violations.

Wikipedia tries hard to obey copyright law. If you think it leads to weird requests, blame the people who made copyright law so stringent, not us.

I just scanned this photo of me / of my grandfather / of my family house. What do you mean I’m not the copyright owner?

Copyright lies with the person who created the work (usually). For photographs, that means the photographer.

In particular:

• it does not matter that you have the photograph in your physical possession (even if it is the only original ever printed)
• consent of a subject of a photograph is irrelevant for copyright purposes

"Releasing work under a license" sounds difficult. Do I need a notarized parchment for this?

No!

A license can be granted by a fairly simple statement. There is no legal requirement of form, as long as the statement is clear enough. For instance, this image was released by the last two lines of a social media comment.

The only tricky thing is that we need to make sure you are really authorized to release the work. If you have an established account on social media, making the statement from that account is sufficient. Otherwise, we might have to go through an email and check which server it comes from.

OK, I allow you to use my work on Wikipedia, for educational purposes, as long as nobody makes money off it. Is that enough?

Not really.

Wikipedia tries to include only libre content; that is, content that can be reused with minimal restrictions (with some exceptions). To do that, Wikipedia only accepts a small set of licenses (mostly from the Creative Commons family). All of those allow reuse by anyone, for any purpose.

A relatively standard restriction, cared for by some Creative Commons licenses, is a non-commercial (NC) clause. Wikipedia intentionally does not allow those licenses. There are multiple reasons for that; the most mundane is that selling CD copies of Wikipedia in places without internet access would not be allowed if there were NC clauses on the content.

If you specify that your work should only appear on Wikipedia, or only for certain purposes, it means you refuse to grant the license we want.