Wiki:Copyrights

This wiki's content is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise indicated.

Guidelines for contributors

Contributors are responsible for making sure their contributions are compatibly licensed under US copyright law. If you're contributing your own original work, you have nothing to worry about. But if you're copying from somewhere else, it could get tricky.

Rule number 1: Don't blindly copy stuff from other places! Just because it's available online doesn't mean you have permission to use it. If the copyright status is unclear, it's better to use your own words instead of someone else's.

That said, it is okay to copy under certain circumstances:

• Works under compatible licenses: Determining what's compatible can sometimes be tricky, but in general, public domain sources are fine, as are some CC licenses. If the license terms require it, make sure to specify the original author/license, e.g., in the change summary.
• Raw factual data: Facts are not copyrightable. If a copyrighted document says "Blue text has element ID 0x2F," you can copy and paste that "0x2F" to your heart's content.
• Content that counts as fair use: For example, if you are writing an article about a copyrighted ZZT game, it's okay to include a screenshot of the title screen for illustrative purposes. If you do this, you should specify (e.g., in the image summary) that the work is not CC BY-SA licensed, as well as the nature of your fair use.

You own copyright on your contributions, and you can license them differently so long as the terms are compatible. For example, if you upload an image that you created, you can declare in the description that you are placing it in the public domain.

Please play along, and we'll all benefit from a useful ZZT reference.