Copyrights

Table of Contents
Users' rights and obligations Example notice Fair use materials and special requirements Contributors' rights and obligations Using copyrighted work from others Linking to copyrighted works If you find a copyright infringement Related topics External links and references

The goal of this forum is to create an information source on household energy that is freely available. By so doing we aim to encourage participatory approaches to tackling the issues of household energy in the context of poverty.

The license we use grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. That is to say, our forum content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the HEDON Household Energy Network or SPARKNET (which all share this forum space) as the source. Forum 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 the forum is licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at Full GNU Free Documentation License.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the text of forum materials under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 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. Articles in the forum (as opposed to other sections of the website) can be identified by a reference to the GFDL at the bottom.

The text of the GFDL is the only legally binding document for the forum pages; what follows is our interpretation of the GFDL: the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

IMPORTANT: If you want to use content from this forum, first read the Users' rights and obligations section below. You should then read the Full GNU Free Documentation License.

[top] [end]Users' rights and obligations

If you want to use materials from this forum in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GFDL, which entails the following:

your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL,
you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B), and
you must provide access to the "transparent copy" of the material (section 4J)(The "transparent copy" of a forum article is its text.)

If you are simply duplicating the forum article, the latter two obligations can be fulfilled by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the forum article hosted on this website.

If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, you need to both acknowledge authorship and provide access to a transparent copy of the new text.

[top] [end]Example notice

An example notice, which complies correctly with the GFDL, for an article that uses the forum article Foo might read as follows:

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Forum article "Foo". ("Foo" and the relevant URL must of course be substituted accordingly.)

Alternatively you can distribute your copy of Foo along with a copy of the GFDL (as explained in the text) and list at least five (or all if less than five) principal authors on the title page (or top of the document).

[top] [end]Fair use materials and special requirements

Occasionally, our forum may include images, sounds, or text quotes used under the "fair use" doctrine. In this case, the material will be identified as from an external source (under references at the bottom of the page). However, what is fair for us to use may not be fair for your intended use of the media.

For example, if we include an image under fair use, you must ensure that your use of the article also qualifies for fair use (this might not be the case, for example, if you were using a forum article for a commercial use that would otherwise be allowed by the GFDL).

Our forum does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original text (such as including Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover Texts). When using these materials, you have to include those invariant sections verbatim.

[top] [end]Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to the forum, 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 therefore must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either you own 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 GFDL, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under GFDL.

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. If the original copy required invariant sections, you have to incorporate those into the forum article; it is however very desirable to replace GFDL texts with invariant sections by original content without invariant sections whenever possible.

[top] [end]Using copyrighted work from others

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 forum material as possible, so original images licensed under the GFDL 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 perfectly legal to read an article, book or other work, reformulate it in your own words, and submit it to our forum.

[top] [end]Linking to copyrighted works

Linking to copyrighted works is usually not a problem, as long as you have made a reasonable effort to determine that the page in question is not violating someone else's copyright. If it is, please do not link to the page. Whether such a link is contributory infringement is currently being debated in the courts, but in any case, linking to a site that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on us.

[top] [end]If you find a copyright infringement

It is not the job of our forum users to police every article for possible copyright infringement, but if you suspect one, you should at the very least bring up the issue as a comment on that 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 our forum. 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 in the comments section of the 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 votes for deletion and a notice given under the comments section of the offending article.

In extreme cases of contributors continuing to post copyrighted material after appropriate warnings, such users may be blocked from editing to protect the project.

[top] [end]Related topics

If you would like to make comments on the copyright used in the forum, please use the copyright comments page.

[top] [end]External links and references

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Copyrights"

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Page created: 25 September 2003; Last edited: 14 November 2007; Version: 5
Forum text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.