Editing Incubator escapee wiki:FAQ/Copyright (section)

===Can I add something to Wikipedia that I got from somewhere else?===
{{shortcut|WP:COMPLIC|WP:Compatible license|WP:Compatible licence||WP:Compatibly licensed}}
{{See|Wikipedia:Copying text from other sources}}
{{main|Wikipedia:Copyrights}}
{{seealso|Wikipedia:Plagiarism}}

:The absence of a copyright notice does not mean that a work may be freely used (at the same time, copyright notices have sometimes been [[Copyfraud|incorrectly applied to uncopyrighted material]]). If in doubt, assume you cannot use it. 

:You can add any type of content if it has been made available by authors under an appropriate license (see [[#Licenses|below]]). It's not enough to have a license that restricts use only to Wikipedia or prohibits commercial use; these are treated as if there was no license at all. You can also add content if it is in the [[public domain]], as discussed [[#Public domain|below]]. If the material you would like to use is not currently licensed compatibly with Wikipedia, you may be able to obtain permission to use it. See [[Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission|Requesting copyright permission]] for details.

:Only text that is licensed compatibly with the [[Wikipedia:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License|Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License]] (CC BY-SA 4.0) or in the public domain can be freely copied onto Wikipedia (if copyright of the previously published text belongs exclusively to you, it must ''also'' be licensed under the [[Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License|GNU Free Documentation License]] (GFDL) to comply with our [[:wmf:Terms of Use|Terms of Use]]). The Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License is not necessarily compatible with other [[copyleft]] licenses. An incomplete table of licenses compatible or not with Wikipedia is shown below. Remember that inputs of Creative Commons licensed text may require attribution; point to the source in your edit summary and, if necessary, with attribution on the article's face using {{tl|CC-notice}} (see [[Wikipedia:Plagiarism#Copying material from free sources]]).

{{anchor|table}}
{| CLASS="wikitable" ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="width:70%; text-align:center; margin-left:6em"
|-
! COLSPAN=2 STYLE="background-color:#BFBFBF;" | '''License compatibility for text attribution on Wikipedia {{NoteTag|For text only; please see [[Wikipedia:File copyright tags]] for licences allowed with files}}'''
|-
! COLSPAN=1  {{yes|Licenses compatible with Wikipedia}} !! COLSPAN=1  {{no|Licenses ''not'' compatible with Wikipedia}}
|-
! COLSPAN=2 STYLE="font-weight:normal; font-style:italic" | Creative Commons Licenses
|- style="vertical-align: top; text-align:left;"
|
[[File:OOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg|20px|link=]]  CC BY, all versions and ports, up to and including 4.0<br/>
[[File:OOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg|20px|link=]]  CC BY-SA 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 4.0<br/>
[[File:OOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg|20px|link=]]  [https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/ CC0]
|
[[File:OOjs_UI_icon_close-ltr-destructive.svg|20px|]] CC BY-SA 1.0<br/>
[[File:OOjs_UI_icon_close-ltr-destructive.svg|20px|]] CC BY-NC<br/>
[[File:OOjs_UI_icon_close-ltr-destructive.svg|20px|]] CC BY-NC-ND<br/>
[[File:OOjs_UI_icon_close-ltr-destructive.svg|20px|]] CC BY-ND<br/>
[[File:OOjs_UI_icon_close-ltr-destructive.svg|20px|]] CC BY-NC-SA 
|-
!COLSPAN=2 STYLE="font-weight:normal; font-style:italic" | Other Licenses
|- style="vertical-align: top; text-align:left;"
| 
[[File:OOjs UI icon check-constructive.svg|20px|link=]]  GFDL '''and''' CC BY or CC BY-SA (not including CC-BY-SA 1.0)
| 
[[File:OOjs_UI_icon_close-ltr-destructive.svg|20px|]] any GNU-only license (including GFDL)
|}

{{notefoot}}

:More licenses are permitted for images. See [[Wikipedia:File copyright tags]] for some of the licenses permitted as well as an explanation of what criteria the license must meet.

:Occasionally, the question is raised about the copyright status of press releases. While press releases are by nature intended to be reproduced widely, there is no inherent permission to alter them or create derivative works based on them, or to use them for commercial purposes. Accordingly, press releases are handled like other copyrighted content. In the absence of explicit disclaimer or permission, these may not be freely reproduced.

:Under very narrow circumstances, copyrighted images and text can be used without permission under the "[[fair use]]" clause of US copyright law. Limited use of copyrighted text, for example, can be done without requiring permission from the rights holders for such things as scholarship and review. See [[Wikipedia:Non-free content]] and [[#What is fair use?|below]] for more information on when and how copyrighted text and images can be used on Wikipedia.

:Unless copyrighted images and text meet Wikipedia's non-free content allowance, we can't use them or create "derivative works" of them. That means we can't translate too much from a copyrighted foreign language source to include it here or prominently feature a copyrighted image inside of a picture we take (see [[#Derivative works|below]] for more explanation of derivative works).

:Facts cannot be copyrighted. It is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Wikipedia. But be careful not to [[WP:close paraphrasing|closely paraphrase]]; the structure, presentation, and phrasing of the information should be your own original creation. The [[United States Supreme Court]] noted in ''[[Feist v. Rural|Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service]]'' that factual compilations of information may be protected with respect to "selection and arrangement, so long as they are made independently by the compiler and entail a minimal degree of creativity," as "[t]he compilation author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the collected data so that they may be used effectively by readers."<ref>{{cite court|litigants=[[Feist v. Rural|Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Service Co.]]|vol=499|reporter=U.S.|opinion=340|court=Supreme Court of the United States|date=1991|url=http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=499&invol=340|via=[[FindLaw]]|access-date=2014-08-23}}</ref> You can use the facts, but unless they are presented without creativity (such as an alphabetical phone directory), you may need to reorganize as well as restate them to avoid [[substantial similarity]] infringement. It can be helpful in this respect to utilize multiple sources, which can provide a greater selection of facts from which to draw.

:Data that is not subject to copyright may be, and indeed often should be, copied verbatim. Examples are parsed and translated example sentences in linguistics, orbital and physical parameters in astronomy, and lists of member species and their interrelationships in biological classifications. Paraphrasing or other alteration in such cases is inappropriate [[WP:OR|original research]] because doing so will change the data and thus invalidate the citation.