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Smallbusiness.com:CopyrightsImportant note: The owners, contributors and users of SmallBusiness.com do not own copyright on Smallbusiness.com article texts and illustrations. It is therefore useless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce content. It is possible to reproduce content under the license and technical conditions applicable to SmallBusiness.com. The permissions to reproduce SmallBusiness.com's content in accordance with these conditions are granted without request. The license SmallBusiness.com uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, SmallBusiness.com content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the SmallBusiness.com article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). SmallBusiness.com articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom. To fulfill the above goals, the text contained in SmallBusiness.com is copyrighted automatically under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works by SmallBusiness.com contributors and licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at SmallBusiness.com:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License.
The English text of the GFDL is the only legally binding document; what follows is our interpretation of the GFDL: the rights and obligations of users and contributors. IMPORTANT: If you want to reuse content from SmallBusiness.com, first read the Reusers' rights and obligations section. You should then read the GNU Free Documentation License.
Contributors' rights and obligationsIf you contribute material to SmallBusiness.com, you thereby license it to the public under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). In order to contribute, you must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either
In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the GFDL license for the versions you placed here: that material will remain under GFDL forever. In the second case, if you incorporate external GFDL materials, as a requirement of the GFDL, you need to acknowledge the authorship and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy. Using copyrighted work from othersAll works are copyrighted unless they either fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. If you use part of a copyrighted work under "fair use", or if you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of our license, you must make a note of that fact (along with names and dates). It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of SmallBusiness.com's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the GFDL or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use. See SmallBusiness.com:Boilerplate request for permission for a form letter asking a copyright holder to grant us a license to use their work under terms of the GFDL. Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt the project. If in doubt, write it yourself. Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to SmallBusiness.com. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference. See plagiarism and fair use for discussions of how much reformulation is necessary in a general context. Linking to copyrighted worksSince most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any SmallBusiness.com article which cites its sources will link to copyrighted material. It is not necessary to obtain the permission of a copyright holder before linking to copyrighted material -- just as an author of a book does not need permission to cite someone else's work in their bibliography. Likewise, SmallBusiness.com is not restricted to linking only to GFDL-free or open-source content. If you know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of the creator's copyright, do not link to that copy of the work. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States (Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry). Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on SmallBusiness.com and its editors. If you find a copyright infringementIf you suspect a copyright infringement, you should at the very least bring up the issue on that page's talk page. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed. The most helpful piece of information you can provide is a URL or other reference to what you believe may be the source of the text. Some cases will be false alarms. For example, if the contributor was in fact the author of the text that is published elsewhere under different terms, that does not affect their right to post it here under the GFDL. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on the Web that was copied from SmallBusiness.com. In both of these cases, it is a good idea to make a note in the talk page to discourage such false alarms in the future. If some of the content of a page really is an infringement, then the infringing content should be removed, and a note to that effect should be made on the talk page, along with the original source. If the author's permission is obtained later, the text can be restored. If all of the content of a page is a suspected copyright infringement, then the page should be listed on SmallBusiness.com:Copyright problems and the content of the page replaced by the standard notice which you can find there. If, after a week, the page still appears to be a copyright infringement, then it may be deleted following the procedures on the votes page. In extreme cases of contributors continuing to post copyrighted material after appropriate warnings, such users may be blocked from editing to protect the project. Image guidelinesImages and photographs, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone holds the copyright unless they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Images on the internet need to be licensed directly from the copyright holder or someone able to license on their behalf. In some cases, fair use guidelines may allow a photograph to be used. Image description pages must be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images, as described at SmallBusiness.com:Image copyright tags. Untagged or incorrectly-tagged images will be deleted. It is currently unclear what should happen in cases where the same image has been uploaded more than once with different respective copyright statements. U.S. government photographsWorks produced by civilian and military employees of the United States federal government in the scope of their employment are public domain by statute. However, not every work republished by the U.S. government falls into this category. The U.S. government can own copyrights that are assigned to it by others -- for example, works created by contractors. Moreover, images and other media found on .mil and .gov websites may be using commercial stock photography owned by others. It may be useful to check the privacy and security notice of the website, but only with an email to the webmaster can you be confident that an image is in the public domain. It should also be noted that governments outside the U.S. often do claim copyright over works produced by their employees for example, Crown copyright in the United Kingdom. Also, most state and local governments in the United States do not place their work into the public domain and do in fact own the copyright to their work. Please be careful to check copyright information before copying. SourceUnited States Code; Title 17; Chapter 1; ยง 105 Subject matter of copyright; United States Government works. Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise. [US Code]
Reusers' rights and obligationsIf you want to use SmallBusiness.com materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GFDL. If you are simply duplicating the SmallBusiness.com article, you must follow section two of the GFDL on verbatim copying. If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails the following:
You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the SmallBusiness.com article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that the owners of SmallBusiness.com make no guarantee to retain authorship information and a transparent copy of articles. Therefore, you are encouraged to provide this authorship information and a transparent copy with your derived works. Fair use materials and special requirementsAll original SmallBusiness.com text is distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License (as noted above). SmallBusiness.com articles may also include quotations, images, or other media under the U.S. Copyright law "fair use" doctrine. It is preferred that these be obtained under the most free content license practical (such as the GFDL or public domain). In cases where no such images/sounds are currently available, then fair use may be used in certain circumstances as described in the criteria for using fair use media. In SmallBusiness.com, such "fair use" material should be identified as from an external source (on the image description page, or history page, as appropriate). This also leads to possible restrictions on the use, outside of SmallBusiness.com, of such "fair use" content retrieved from SmallBusiness.com: this "fair use" content does not fall under the GFDL license as such, but under the "fair use" (or similar/different) regulations in the country where the media are retrieved. If you are the owner of SmallBusiness.com-hosted content being used without your permissionIf you are the owner of content that is being used on SmallBusiness.com without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from SmallBusiness.com; send such email requests to copyright@smallbusiness.com. You may also blank the page and replace it with the words Removed for Copyright Violation but the text will still be in the page history until we can permanently remove it. Either way, we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership. CreditThis information is based on the Copyrights approach of Wikipedia
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This page was created on Feb 24, 2007 |
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