Editing Incubator escapee wiki:FAQ/Copyright (section)

==Licenses==
:A license is a permission to use a work in the way described by the license. A single work can have as many licenses as the creator decides are useful. 

::''Example – the very widely used database MySQL is available with at least two possible licenses, one a [[GNU General Public License|GPL]] license, the other a license allowing distribution of modifications without compelling publication of source code.'' 

:It's very common for a copyright holder to provide licenses tailored to the needs of an individual large business customer; it's much less so for individual, and small business customers. Typically, individuals will use one of the following boilerplates: 

===Non-commercial licenses=== 
{{shortcut|WP:NONCOM}}
:There are many different kinds of non-commercial licenses, but generally they say something like ''You may use, copy, or distribute this work for non-commercial purposes''. 

:: ''Example: "Images contributed to this database by the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes without asking permission from the COC or paying copyright royalty"''

:[[Jimmy Wales|Jimbo]] has prohibited the use of these<ref name=JW_1>[https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-May/023760.html Jimbo has prohibited the use of noncommercial-only images]</ref> and the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation passed an official resolution about this in 2007.<ref>[[:foundation:Resolution:Licensing policy|Resolution:Licensing policy]], the Wikimedia Foundation wiki.</ref> They may still be used under the doctrine of [[:WP:FAIR|fair use]] in the English Wikipedia; some other projects, such as the Spanish Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons, prohibit them entirely.

===Educational licenses===
:It is very common for scientific works to allow educational use. What each publisher considers to be educational varies. Some consider only schools and colleges to be educational, others include all forms of public education, including encyclopedias, to be educational.

:Jimbo has prohibited the use of these.<ref name=JW_1/> However, they may still be used under the terms of fair use.

===Permissive licenses===
:[[Permissive licenses]] allow for unrestricted  use, modification, and distribution of a copyrighted work. The  modified [[BSD license]], the [[X11 license]], and the [[MIT license]] are each examples of permissive licenses. These licenses seek to make it as easy as possible to reuse the licensed work: the objective is generally to make the work available and as widely used as possible, but without releasing it to the public domain. Those using permissively licensed works can relicense derivative work under more restrictive license terms. 

:Because of the very limited license requirements, license incompatibility problems with this type of license are relatively uncommon, so it is very easy to reuse these works.

===Attribution licenses===
{{shortcut|WP:Attribution licenses|WP:Attribution licences}}
:An attribution license is a permissive license with an additional requirement of attribution of previous authors' works in any derivative work. An attribution licenses says (essentially): "You may use, copy, or distribute this work, as long as you give credit to the original author". The original "four clause" [[BSD license]] is an example of an attribution license.

::''Example: "Photo by John Smith. Copyright 1999. Permission granted for free use and distribution, conditioned upon inclusion of the above attribution and copyright notice."

===Copyleft licenses===  
<!-- changed from share and share-alike to copyleft because copyleft better expresses the legal aspects and is better known -->
:Some licenses are called "copyleft" licenses. Essentially, they have three key properties:
:* A work licensed with a copyleft license can be copied at will.
:* All published derivative works must use exactly the same license as the original: if you use the work, you're forced to use the same license for your own original work as well.
:* If your work is using a different license, you can't use the copyleft license, even if your work is also using a (different) copyleft licence.

:If you don't want to accept the license of the copyleft work then you may not use the copyleft work as part of your own work.

:There is increasing awareness of the license incompatibility problem of copyleft licenses, since many people are simply trying to force reusers to publish the source of their work. This is why we, with the cooperation of the Free Software Foundation, arranged to migrate Wikipedia from the GFDL license to the CC-BY-SA license and why we recommend this license to others.

:On Wikipedia, images licensed under incompatible but similar copyleft licenses are allowed, as they can be incorporated into articles at will (as the actual text under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License and the GNU Free Documentation License just has a pointer to the image) and the only thing that can't be done is using parts of both images to create a new image (as derivatives must be under the same license).

====Creative Commons licenses====
:"[[Creative Commons License]]" (CCL) may refer to one of several licenses written by [[Creative Commons]] (founded by [[Lawrence Lessig]]). Most of the CCLs allow non-commercial distribution of the work if it's unmodified, but different ones allow different combinations of various features:

:* Requiring attribution.
:* Noncommercial (disallowing commercial reuse).
:* No Derivative Works (prohibiting someone from distributing a derivative work).
:* [[Share-alike|Share Alike]] (copyleft) (requiring someone to distribute their derivative work under the same license).
:* Some of the deprecated licences still apply full copyright to people in developed countries (Developing Nations Licence), or don't permit distribution of the whole work (Sampling Licence)

:All text on Wikipedia is licensed under the [//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike 4.0 International License], following a transition from the GFDL.

====GFDL====
:The [[GNU Free Documentation License]] (GFDL) is a copyleft license produced by the [[Free Software Foundation]].

::''Example: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or later'' 

:Some people have complained that the GFDL is too hard to interpret and too hard for reusers of small works to comply with because the license can be longer than the work covered by the license. This reflects its origins as a license intended for manuals, not small works. There is some hope that the FSF will help to remove these problems in a future version.

:Most of the text on Wikipedia is also licensed under GFDL. In order to determine whether a page is available under the GFDL, review the page footer, page history, and discussion page for attribution of single-licensed content that is not GFDL-compatible.

===Typical commercial licenses===
:A typical commercial license is written to prohibit redistribution and limit the rights of the licensee as far as practical while still allowing them to make some use of the work. While any license is better than no license, these are often very restrictive.

:As with non-commercial and educational licenses, these may not be used on Wikipedia, although works licensed as such may be used under the guise of fair use.