Wikipedia:Basic copyright issues
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Copyright is complicated. This unfortunately means that Wikipedia's upload rules have to be complicated.
Sadly not everyone understands the rules and as a result, thousands of images have to be deleted every week. This page is an attempt to explain the basic requirements for uploading images to the English language Wikipedia.
The straightforward case
If you have taken an image yourself of an object that isn't artwork in its own right you can upload it as long as you release it under a
When it is clear you are the owner and are willing to provide a suitably free license for your image, please upload it to the Wikimedia Commons, which can be done here
Legal issues
Wikipedia is a worldwide project, and much of the complexity surrounding copyright comes from the fact that laws differ from country to country. The most important thing for Wikipedia is to abide by U.S. copyright law, because the servers are located in the United States. Nevertheless, Wikipedia is used around the world, and since our mission is to create a free encyclopedia for the world, awareness of more restrictive conditions elsewhere is important.
Key principles and common misunderstandings
The most important things to remember are that all creative work generates a new copyright by default, and the absence of a copyright notice does not mean it is in the
Additionally, a work based on an existing work is simply considered a copy unless it was made with the express permission of the original copyright holder. So even if you take a screenshot from a game or movie and heavily edit it, the resulting image is still owned by the original copyright holder and cannot be released under a free license without their permission.
Fair use
Under U.S. law, there is a doctrine called fair use, which allows copyrighted works to be used without permission in a limited way for things like scholarship and review. Note that fair use is only a valid defense as long as the use is "fair" in that it does not negatively affect the economic interests of the copyright holder. For example, fair use does not allow a complete copy of a book or map that is currently for sale to be put online. Fair use claims are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, so what is judged to be fair use in one case may not be so in another. It depends on the nature of the work and the context in which it is used. Fair use in commercial publications is a grey area and very open to interpretation, but a non-profit educational institution like Wikipedia has wider leeway.
Outside of the U.S., some jurisdictions have copyright exceptions similar to fair use, while many others have significantly different doctrines, or nothing at all.
Wikipedia policies
Legal issues aside, Wikipedia policies impose further restrictions on what kind of material can be upload to the site. Just because something is legal does not automatically mean it can be used on Wikipedia.
One of Wikipedia's goals is to create free content (free as in speech) that anyone can use for any purpose as long as they abide by the requirements of the GFDL license.
For this reason, free (as in speech) content is always preferred over un-free or restricted content. Wikipedia does allow
Basically, fair use content should be replaced by free content whenever possible, because we want our content to be truly free. The rationale we use to claim fair use on Wikipedia (a non-profit website) might not apply to someone wanting to distribute a version of the article elsewhere, forcing them to remove the image anyway. Wikipedia is not responsible for the legal situation of such downstream users, but we try to make it easy for downstream users to reuse our content. This means that our fair use content should ideally be backed by detailed
The GFDL license under which Wikipedia is released explicitly allows our content to be used commercially. For this reason, all our free content must allow commercial use, even though Wikipedia itself is non-profit. Many people are willing to let their images be used for non-commercial purposes, but unfortunately Wikipedia cannot accept images with such a restriction. Similarly, because the GFDL license permits anyone to re-use our content, we can not allow content for which the owner has given permission only for Wikipedia itself to use. Some people might also be willing to let us use their images provided they are not altered in any way, however again the GFDL states that our content may be altered and built upon so such restrictions are not acceptable either. For these reasons most content found on the internet must be considered non-free or not usable for our purposes. Only content that has been explicitly released under GDFL or compatible license by the copyright holder may be used. Anything else may still qualify as fair use in the right context, but a fair use rationale is still required to use such images on Wikipedia.
To obtain freely licensed images, you can take photos yourself and upload them under a free license, place
Sourcing and tagging
All media uploaded to Wikipedia require a source and a "
If you upload an image under a fair use claim, be sure that it complies with
See also
- Wikipedia:Copyrights
- Wikipedia:Image use policy
- Wikipedia:Non-free content
- Wikipedia:Image description page
- Wikipedia:Image copyright tags
- Another essay explaining why we cannot accept non-commercial and education-only content