Commons:First steps/License selection
From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository
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[edit] How to select the right license
Choosing your file's license is an important decision, as all content in Wikimedia Commons has to be licensed freely. It is therefore imperative to clarify your rights to upload it under a free license. The decision tree is a graphical overview of the issues below.
[edit] Tips and tricks
- Generally, if you're releasing your own content under a free license, you cannot revoke the permissions granted.
- The easiest case of licensing are self-drawn images. Pictures taken by you are a little bit more problematic, as every person displayed has to agree on publishing it. This doesn't apply if the photograph has been taken at public events or the persons are well-known, provided the photograph hasn't been taken in that person's private vicinity.
- Artwork permanently displayed in public is covered in several nations, including for example, Germany, Switzerland and Austria under Freedom of Panorama, while other nations like France and Belgium have no such regulation. If Freedom of Panorama applies, you can upload your images of either artwork or buildings undaunted. This is not allowed in nations like France and Belgium, e.g. you cannot upload a picture of the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium. In cases where the object in question was only temporarily installed in a public place, freedom of panorama might not apply. One famous example for this was the wrapped Reichstag by Christo in Berlin, Germany. You'll also have to obtain permission for objects in museums or shots on private property — indoor photographs especially strictly require the owner's consent.
- Most images you'll find on the Internet can't be uploaded, unless the copyright owner explicitly allowed for publication under a free license. You might try asking for permission, however. If you obtained such a permission via email, please forward it to permissions@wikimedia.org and reference it at upload. It is advisable to attach a standard declaration of consent such as Commons:Email templates to your email asking for permission.
- If a work's author died more than 70 years ago it is within the public domain in most nations and can be uploaded in almost all cases. This applies to third party reproductions as well, as these lack the required own creativity needed to put it under copyright (see for example the Bridgeman v. Corel case).
- More detailed information on copyright and licensing as well as copyright laws in different nations can be found at Commons:Licensing.
With this basic knowledge in mind you should be able to choose the proper license in most cases. Just select the desired license from the "Licensing" drop down list.
[edit] Available licenses
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| License | A legal document outlining the permitted use (or lack thereof) of media. Only the copyright owner of media can apply a license to it. |
| CC | Creative Commons, an organization that has written free licenses for public use. These licenses are prefixed with CC. |
| Attribution | Giving credit to the author. In CC licenses, this is abbreviated with BY. |
| Share-alike | Licensing works derived from a copylefted source in a similar fashion |
| Copyleft | Allowing more permissive use than traditional copyright |
| Fair use | A doctrine in which the public has a limited right to use copyrighted materials |
If the media you are uploading is your own work, you have a number of available licenses to choose from. If you are not concerned with your rights to the media and merely want to add a file quickly, choosing an option from the "Best practices" section is a great choice. If you want to weigh what permissions you give and what rights you obtain, study each license and decide based upon your criteria. Following are a basic outline of each license, organized by best and better options.
If there is no appropriate license to select, you can set "None" and manually insert the proper license later on (for a list of all allowed licenses see Commons:Copyright tags). This is a rather advanced way, however, as it requires you to know the exact license template's name.
- "I don't know what the license is"
- This isn't a valid option, but rather a test to verify that you know what you're doing. Images uploaded with this option checked will be deleted. Especially Fair use and other unfree licenses (like grants for non-commercial usage) are not allowed at Wikimedia Commons.
[edit] Best practices
- "Own work, copyleft, attribution required (Multi-license GFDL, all CC-BY-SA)"
- It is possible to publish your works under multiple licenses. This combination requires that the author of the media be credited for the work and any derivative works to be licensed similarly. This is the recommended choice, as it makes using your media files very easy while still allowing you to keep some rights to the work.
- "Own work, attribution required (GFDL, CC-BY 3.0)"
- Another multi-license, this option requires attribution and/or releasing derivative works under similar licenses.
- "Own work, all rights released (Public domain)"
- With this choice, you grant everyone the permission to use your image for whatever purpose they see fit. People don't even have to credit you. Once within the public domain, your image cannot be relicensed later on. Other free licenses allow you to retain at least some of your rights.
[edit] Better practices
- "Attribution 2.5" and "Attribution share alike 2.5"
- These licenses were created by Creative Commons, who created a group of modular licenses which can be mixed in many variations. The two accepted Creative Commons licenses at Wikimedia Commons are "Attribution" ({{cc-by}}) and "Attribution share alike" ({{cc-by-sa}}) in every published version. Basically, "Attribution 2.5" requires crediting the author, whereas "Attribution share alike 2.5" requires people to additionally release modifications under this very license — the copyleft principle.
- "GNU Free Documentation License"
- The GNU Free Documentation License is the license used by Wikipedia for texts and is older than the Creative Commons licenses. It is similar to the CC Attribution share alike license, but additionally requires a copy of the full license text to be distributed with every collection of GFDL works, which is rather unwieldy for printing images on postcards, for example.
[edit] Wrapping up
Once you're done with these choices, it is a good idea to check "Watch this page" to keep track of any changes pertaining to your image. With your personal watchlist, you can see the tracked files' change dates, comments and the persons committing the change. You can find the watchlist in the user tabs atop any page.
Finally, once you click on "Upload file" it may be necessary to approve this action, as your software might consider this a security issue. After the upload is complete — which may take a while — you'll be redirected to that image's page.
[edit] Further reading
Wikimedia Commons pages:
