LabelingThoughts:Copyrights
From LabelingThoughts
The following is a summary of what you should know about copyrights and this site.
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Your Contributions
Copyrights for articles are held by their authors. Adding content to the site releases that content under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means that anyone may modify and redistribute what is written here, including for commercial use.
Including Non-Free Content
Do not add any material to the site where you do not own the copyright, except as explained below. This will help ensure that the site can fulfill its mission as a resource for dharma teachers and students, include good quality content, and is in compliance with relevant laws.
If possible, do not include copyrighted content even if it would fall under fair use. If it is possible to include non-copyrighted content or freshly created content instead please do that. Some quotations might be particularly pithy, but do not include so many as to become a resource of quotations. Reference relevant works, and help people find the best sources. Respect the commercial opportunities of those works, and do not attempt to supplant them. Minimize any quotation or use as much as possible. And only include fair use content if it significantly increases the understanding or usefulness of the article and would be detrimental to omit it.
If you find any copyrighted content that has been included that violates fair use, please remove the content and make a note of the issue on that article's discussion page. For the purposes of this web site, we will use the U.S. copyright concept of "fair use".
Indices of source material is currently an exception to this rule, because they can offer significant benefit (by enabling a unified source search) without duplicating significant portions of the copyrighted work. If one were to generate an index by hand, one would produce a substantially similar reference. If you'd like to discuss the inclusion of an indices, please do so on the discussion page of this article (click on the discussion tab above). This usage of copyrighted material is significantly less than the Google library project. They include some portion of original source unless requested otherwise, as opposed to just listing page numbers where terms are found. For a page discussing the Google project's copyright fair use interpretation visit their legal analysis page but also review the opposing points of view section on that page. Currently litigation in some countries is challenging their fair use interpretation, that providing source material as well is not fair use.
For some useful articles on fair use:
You may also find the Wikipedia project's policy on fair use in their encyclopedia an interesting comparison.
This policy is up for community discussion (as are all policies) on the discussion page or by entering a comment in the form below. Please keep in mind this policy has important legal implications for the site administrator.
General Guidelines
Including short quotes to illustrate a key point in an article is ok, as long as the quote is minimal and adds significant usefulness to the article. Make sure to include a full citation for the quote, including author and source text and page number or equivalent. When quoting enclose larger quotes in <blockquote> and </blockquote> tags - if you're comfortable doing so - to denote the quote separately from the text of the article. Otherwise enclose them with quotation marks.
We may allow image uploading at some point, but for now email us any images that you would like to include on the site but please let us know who the copyright owner is and if the image is released for use on this site. It would be a huge help if you own any images yourself that you would like to contribute.
Thank You
Thank you for taking an interest in this project, and in safeguarding it by policing and maintaining copyright awareness while editing this site.
