The Evanescence Reference:Copyrights

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to The Evanescence Reference, you thereby license it to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License (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

• you hold the copyright to the material, for instance because you produced it yourself, or
• you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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 copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License forever.

In the second case, if you incorporate external Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License materials, as a requirement of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, you need to acknowledge the authorship and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy.

Using copyrighted work from others

All works are copyrighted unless either they 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 The Evanescence Reference's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use.

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 The Evanescence Reference. 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 works

Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any The Evanescence Reference 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, The Evanescence Reference is not restricted to linking only to Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License-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 The Evanescence Reference and its editors. The copyright status of Internet archives in the United States is unclear, however. It is currently acceptable to link to Internet archives such as the Wayback Machine.

If you find a copyright infringement

If 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 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on the Web that was copied from The Evanescence Reference. 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.

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 guidelines

Images on The Evanescence Reference are not typically made to adhere to any guidelines, but please know we highly encourage you to do so.

Images 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 should 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.

If you are the owner of Evanescence Reference-hosted content being used without your permission

If you are the owner of content that is being used on The Evanescence Reference without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from The Evanescence Reference on the article's talk page. You can also contact the system admin DhammaSeeker to have it permanently removed, but it may take up to a week for the page to be deleted that way (you may also blank the page and replace it with a notification of such, but the text will still be in the page history). Either way, we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership and why you don't want it included.

Adapted from Wikipedia's sister page.