WikiFur:Copyrights
| This page is an official policy on WikiFur. This policy serves as a place to record previous consensus actions, and should be followed except when consensus dictates otherwise. Significant changes to this policy should first be proposed on the discussion page. |
Written work
All written work submitted to WikiFur is placed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC-BY-SA) and, unless otherwise specified, the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 (GFDL). The copyright of work submitted to this Wiki remains with the copyright holder - which, if you wrote it, will be you. Submitting your work does not restrict what you can do with it; it just permits us to do certain things with it as well.
By submitting your work, you grant WikiFur permission to distribute it under the terms of CC-BY-SA 4.0 and GFDL 1.3 (or later), and you accept that others may modify and distribute your work under the same terms. That means they may change what articles say, and make copies of WikiFur articles on other sites, as long as they license such copies under one or both of these licenses.
- Note that you cannot retract this license. You can, of course, edit an article to alter or remove your work if you do not want it there anymore, but you cannot stop someone reinstating it. Please think carefully about whether you want to write something on WikiFur before you do so.
Submitting the work of others
You may submit the work of others if they say it is in the public domain, or freely licensed under any version of CC-BY-SA, or a BY-SA 4.0 compatible license where import is permitted; this includes the Free Art License 1.3, but not GNU GPLv3. Just copying from a website with no indication that the work is under such a license is not acceptable; such work is liable to removal. This applies to written works, visual art and all other forms of creative expression.
You must comply with any attribution requirements for the original work. If you submit work that is under the CC-BY-SA but not the GFDL, please note this in the page footer, edit summary or on the talk page. GFDL-only work may not be added; the relicensing period has passed.
Redistribution of content
To people wishing to distribute WikiFur's text content:
- WikiFur is Copyright © to its contributors. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, using the work's URL as attribution; and, unless otherwise specified, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
CC-BY-SA and compatible licenses such as the Free Art License and GNU GPLv3 require you to link back to our articles. If you use the GFDL, you must link back if you modify the work, and you must also list the most prominent original authors. In any case, you must license your copy under the CC-BY-SA (or compatible license) and/or the GFDL — and give a public indication of this license — so that it remains free for others others to copy and modify.
You should read the above licenses and the reusers' rights and obligations section of Wikipedia (which explains this in much more detail) before copying work. Having done so, feel free to export an article or download the database.
Wikia/Fandom
As of June 2023, Wikia/Fandom remains on CC-BY-SA 3.0, which cannot import CC-BY-SA 4.0 (this used to apply to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, too). This means you cannot simply copy WikiFur article text to Wikia/Fandom. Page revisions prior to 29 November 2013 were submitted as CC-BY-SA 3.0 and may be used under it; you should note this in edit summaries, as it may be detected as a potential copyright violation. Editors are likely to be willing to license subsequent contributions, but you must obtain their permission.
WikiFur News
WikiFur News articles (which pre-date 2013) are licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0, GFDL 1.2 and later and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. You may use any or all of these when redistributing content from the WikiFur News archives (pages prefaced with "News:").
Images
- Main article: WikiFur:Image use policy
Images and other uploads may be submitted under some version of CC-BY-SA, another free license, or as fair use, but please be careful about the last one as it is open to interpretation. If in doubt, contact a curator.
As images are separately licensed, CC-BY-SA version compatibility should not be an issue for reuse. However, some images are only licensed for use on WikiFur, and these may not be reused without permission.
Misuse of copyrighted work
WikiFur does not support copyright infringement, though as noted above we do permit fair use. If you find your work is here without your permission, please contact the WikiFur curators.