Template talk:Copyrighted free use

Explicitly allow modifications

There have been questions raised as to whether this tag also implies that modifications are allowed. If so, this should be stated explicitely. If not, this tag should ne be "accepted" but handeled as a reason for deletion, just like {Copyrighted}. Please help to clarify this -- Duesentrieb 10:46, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

"for any purpose" sounds to me like modifications are allowed. -- Toby Bartels 22:17, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

No rights are retained. It is for all practical purposes as though the work is in the public domain. I would favour making this more explicit, but modifying an existing license tag is dangerous. (Really, I shouldn't have modified it either.) Dcoetzee 19:44, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This image is definitely not copyright free and any images in Categories: Jersey | René Lalique | Churches in Jersey | Angels | Saint Matthew churches are owned by the Church. Just becuase its a church people think things are free but the church has a considerable list of expenses to maintain this historic art deco building. If you wish to use any images in Categories: Jersey | René Lalique | Churches in Jersey | Angels | Saint Matthew churches you must contact the church office for permission. Many thanks Glass Church - Jersey —81.20.191.241, 2009-03-26T21:59:53

As best I can tell by comparing the categories, this person is talking about File:Lalique glass altarpiece in the Glass Church Jersey.jpg. —Toby Bartels (talk) 23:43, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Focus on freedom, not copyright

I hate the form of this tag, since it stresses the copyrighted nature most of all. Almost every other tag is also for copyrighted material, after all. This is listed on the template page under "copyrighted but free", but again almost every tag listed under free at all is copyrighted.

Anyway, my biggest problem is that it needs a symbol, and I don't know what symbol to use. If I come up with one, then I'll change it (unless perhaps somebody objects). But in the meantime, if anybody else has a good idea, then please don't wait for me! ^_^

-- Toby Bartels 22:17, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree — free use works may be copyrighted, but it hardly matters when that copyright no longer gives any rights to the work. The logo is particularly jarring. I modified it to the one now used on the English Wikipedia. Dcoetzee 20:49, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I changed it again — I really want to use this tag together with the PD-user template, and it contradicts it if it says the work is copyrighted. Dcoetzee 20:56, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I rather like your solution, Dcoetzee --so simple! It would still be great to have an appropriate symbol, but in this case, none is better than that big read symbol of restriction --so misleading here. (The small green version is probably OK, IMO; but still, why make it more complicated than it needs to be?) -- Toby Bartels 21:57, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I prefer the tag material copylefted by the author. --Mac 12:15, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

The term "copyleft" indicates licenses that require share-alike and attribution. This does not apply here. -- Duesentrieb 13:50, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

• My understanding was always: copyleft = share-alike. Attribution is a separate issue. Brianjd (talk) 11:31, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Encouraging PD-self is USA-POV

Why the note "If this is your own work, please consider using PD-self instead"? Public domain does not exist in the European Union, for example. Please take that USA-POV-comment away!/83.250.58.197 00:17, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

PD-self provides permission to similar effect as an alternative for jurisdictions lacking a clearly defined concept of public domain and/or mechanisms for actively placing a work in the public domain. —LX (talk, contribs) 15:58, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

A translation is required

Translations of this template are required, so that people on other wikipedias may know that the image is in fact a free image. -Aknorals 13:10, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Please add {{/lang}} into the template. Platonides 13:12, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Deprecate/rewrite {{Copyrighted free use}}

It should be replaced by:

• {{PD-self}}
• {{PD-author}} or
• {{PD-because}}

Fred Chess 20:21, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

No, not at all. In Europe there is no "public domain". Please change the template. —the preceding unsigned comment is by 83.250.58.197 (talk • contribs) 12:32, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

PD-self caters for this since May 2005. PD-author has catered for it since its creation in February 2006. With PD-because, the reasoning supplied can cater for it in its rationale. —LX (talk, contribs) 15:53, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

That said, I'm unsure whether or not those templates can replace this one. There may be cases where a third-party author has granted free use without explicitly placing the work in the public domain, even though her jurisdiction might enable this. Couldn't stating that such a work is in the public domain imply things it shouldn't? —LX (talk, contribs) 16:17, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I could think of one possible case: when someone grants their work to the public domain, they no longer have any control over it. It seems like one could argue in court that they still have control over their work if they license it with this license. I do not have any legal citations or case studies, but it seems possible. --Iamunknown 04:07, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

I want to use this template, rather than {{PD-self}}, for my own work. Under current law (at least in the United States, where both I and Wikimedia live), the concept of the public domain is a farce; the intent of the law is to destroy the public domain (specifically, to make it consist entirely of works created before 1923). To protest this, I provide blanket permission for all use instead.

Legally, I cannot use the public domain without cooperating with a fundamentally unjust copyright regime, because the only content that I can place into the public domain is content that I own complete rights to. If I create (what is legally) a derivative work of copyrighted material and try to place this into the public domain, then this is null and void; even if the creator of the original work later gives permission, my derivative work is still copyrighted and legally restricted. However, if I give blanket permission for all use, then that probably stands. For this reason, the public domain is fundamentally incompatible with the civil disobedience that is necessary to destroy the copyright regime. As a practical reason, this doesn't apply to Wikimedia, because I make sure of the copyright status of what I put here (for Wikimedia's reasons, not my own). But it adds to my distaste for the farce of public domain.

—Toby Bartels 21:17, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Please add the lang template

Hi, could you please add the {{Copyrighted free use/lang}} template at the bottom of the tag (under a horizontal line) ? Thank you, le Korrigan →bla 20:29, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Georg. le Korrigan →bla 12:59, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Not everything is an image

The text of this template currently begins with "The copyright holder of this image..." and later goes on to state "If the image requires attribution..."

However, not every file to which this could be applied is an image. It might also be a video or a sound recording, for example. Most other licence tags use neutral language like "file," "work" or "media." I believe this one ought to as well.

—LX (talk, contribs) 15:16, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Suggested disclaimer

Because of the high incidence of people using this template incorrectly, I believe it would be prudent to include a disclaimer similar to that used in {{PD-because}}. My modified suggestion is this:

Please check the source to verify that this is correct. In particular, note that publication on the Internet, like publication by any other means, does not in itself imply permission to redistribute. Files without valid permission should be tagged with {{copyvio}}.

—LX (talk, contribs) 15:37, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Alright, lets discuss a while more and make some suggested template here on this talk page, to make sure we get everything right at once when we change it. / Fred Chess 22:43, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I just checked 150 images that link to this template and had to make about 120 edits because of it (it is also linked from {{PD}}). Luckily there are only about 33,000 left now :-) Siebrand 09:20, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

See my contributions for a few more images from Category:Copyrighted free use that were obvious copyvios, fairuse, non-commercial, or had no information whatsoever about source and/or author... And that were just the most obvious ones I found when I randomly opened a few pages in this category. I guess if all images were to be reviewed, 1/4 or 1/3 of the images in this category would have to be deleted. --88.134.44.28 02:34, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, seems like there were no objections in the nearly four years since I proposed this, so said and (eventually) done. I decided to point to npd instead of copyvio, though. —LX (talk, contribs) 16:41, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Edit request

{{editprotected}} Is it possible to add at the bottom where it says about the 2 other templates? 71.233.232.243 16:20, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

 Not done No real reason to have the extra image in there. MECU≈talk 21:16, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

"Copyrighted free use" is an oxymoron

That's why we deleted {{CopyrightedFreeUse}} from the English Wikipedia. 90% of the people that were using it were using it for copyrighted images they found on the web. Now this template has been copied back to the English Wikipedia to keep template parity with Commons. Ugh. Can we please deprecate this template from Commons as well? Kaldari (talk) 21:32, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Why do you call this an oxymoron? It certainly exists, even if people apply the phrase too broadly. In fact, all of my creative work, including all of my contributions to Wikimedia, is copyrighted free use[1]; (almost) none of it is in the public domain. —Toby Bartels (talk) 05:46, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Your page says "I reserve no copyright", that sounds like the opposite of "copyrighted" to me. Kaldari (talk) 15:13, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

It says "I reserve no copyright [...] rights", the opposite of the usual "All [copyright] rights reserved". The fact is that most of my work is copyrighted (at least wherever the Berne convention applies), through government fiat rather than any action of my own, since I haven't explicitly released it into the public domain. In fact, most of my work on Wikimedia, as well as much of my work elsewhere, cannot be released into the public domain, since it's derived from copyrighted work that I don't own the rights to. If I were to say "All of my work is in the public domain", this would have almost no legal effect. This is why I make the blanket pronouncement that I reserve no rights; then anyone wanting to reproduce my derivative work in violation of the GNU FDL (or whatever it's under) need only check with the other editors. In many cases (such as my original work) this is overkill, and in many cases (like most Wikipedia articles) it is insignificant; but in any case, it covers in one statement everything that I can do, unlike a blanket pronouncement about the public domain. So I don't bother with releasing things into the public domain, even when I can.

Now, the current phrasing on the public-domain templates actually takes this problem into account; when the public domain is impossible it falls back to copyrighted free use. So it's not as bad as it used to be. If Wikimedia had a policy of not accepting copyrighted free use contributions, requiring every to contribution to either have some restrictions or be explicitly released into public domain (or be ineligible for copyright), then I would release my original contributions into the public domain. (Better to get the things in than harp on a legal technicality.) But I don't see the need for any such policy. Instead, Wikimedia requires only that contributions be legal and free; we don't micromanage how this is done (which is why there are many templates, including this one).

—Toby Bartels (talk) 05:49, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that if your work is in fact derivative of other copyrighted works you don't have a license to modify, then it is illegal to create at all; you would be infringing the derivative works right of the original copyright holder [U.S.C. §106(2)]. In any case that it would be legal to create a work without the original author's permission, it is also legal to release it into the public domain. Only the legal copyright holder(s) have the right to provide a work under any license or into the public domain. In the case of a derivative work, the full copyright license to the work must cover all copyrightable elements in the work. For example, I could make a derivative of a CC-BY work and license my alterations as PD, but the resulting work would still be subject to the CC-BY license of the original work. Even though it is legal for me to make a derivative, I do not have the right to override the original author's license terms. If I do not know the license of an existing work and it is not in the PD, then I cannot provide a (complete) license to the derivative, regardless of how I am willing to license my alterations to the original. In the particular case of your contributions, it is generally held that font bitmaps are not copyrightable in the U.S., so it seems reasonable to claim that the original glyphs are in the public domain, even if their source is not known. In any case, I don't see how this template is any more appropriate than PD for a derivative of a work with an unknown license... --Speight (talk) 07:58, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, I don't contribute anything to Wikimedia that is derivative of other copyright works that I don't have a license to modify; what did I write above that made you think that I might? And of course I wouldn't try to release anything into the public domain that I don't have the right to release; on the contrary, the reason that I'm arguing to preserve this template is that I don't release into the PD even what I do have the right to release! So I don't understand what "problem" you're talking about. I'm not sure what font bitmaps you're talking about; the only thing like that that I think that I contributed here are the ones that start at File:Glagolica.gif, which don't use this template. However, if you think know they're PD under U.S. law, then please label them so; I am delighted if that is the case! —Toby Bartels (talk) 03:34, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Edit request

{{editprotected}}

Can we get the green copyright symbol back? It's not correct, as Kaldari stated, that this green symbol is "a regular copyright symbol". In fact it fits into a family of copyright symbols, and its special colour distinguishes it from the others. In contrast, Kaldari's new symbol implies something false: that the material covered by this licence is not copyrighted.

A neutral symbol that implies nothing about the copyright status one way or the other would be fine with me. (In fact, a lot of the copyrighted free templates could use such a symbol.) After all, the important thing is the free use, not the copyright, even though technically these works are copyrighted.

—Toby Bartels (talk) 06:02, 21 August 2008 (UTC) (edited from a comment on 05:52, 17 August 2008)

Agreed. The slashed-C symbol is clearly incorrect. Powers (talk) 19:18, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't know what they were thinking - the template title even says "copyrighted" O-o  — Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 22:59, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Hoorah, thanks Mike. —Toby Bartels (talk) 17:11, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Language add

Requesting for add of /ro language to the translation template, for all I see it's protected, but I made the translation already. --Anime Addict AA (talk) 16:50, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

==Term "

"==

Please add {{CopyrightedFreeUse}} in the noinclude section. That's essential... --Mattes (talk) 09:56, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Other uses of essentially the same licence

Especially for people who find this licence incomprehensible, but also for the record for anybody, here are other uses of essentially the same licence:

• the Haskell wiki
• the FSF's "simple all-permissive license"

Note that the latter is not quite all-permissive; it requires a copyright notice. The former is equivalent to this one for purposes of copyright law, although it also includes a warranty/liability disclaimer. —Toby Bartels (talk) 16:48, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Attribution

2006 was removed explicitly the hint "allows ... without attribution". This is valid until today. From 2006 forward no additional information as part of the banner or as part of the documentation is to find that attribution is not required. So some creators may be assume that in use of the image attribution will be follow. Therefore now should be added the hint attribution is required. --theway (talk) 06:41, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Downloading files with this license in media viewer

Any files with this license when you try to download them in the media viewer, it still says "you need to attribute the author", even though not only does this license exist,

but it also recommends you use this license for your own works instead

The copyrighted free use license appears to look as if the file do not need attribution, so why does it say you need to attribute the author when you download this even though theres an identical template to this for stuff you actually do need attribution for? this is pretty strange to me. Maybe i'm missing something idk, but it should probably say "you can attribute the author" instead AuroraANovaUma (talk) 14:37, 29 March 2024 (UTC)