Note: Neo-Restoration.net does not own copyright on RM Wiki article texts and illustrations. It is therefore useless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce articles or images''', even if the rules of operation of your company or school mandate that you ask web site operators before copying their content.
Permission to reproduce content under the license and technical conditions applicable to RM Wiki (see below) has already been granted to everyone without request by the authors of individual articles and images, at least unless they violated RM Wiki rules by uploading copyrighted material without authorization or under incorrect licensing terms. For permission to use it outside these terms, one must contact all the volunteer authors of the text or illustration in question.
The license RM Wiki uses grants free access to our content in a conditional sense. RM Wiki 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 RM Wiki article used (a direct link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement). RM Wiki articles therefore will remain free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (CC (by-nc-sa)) and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom.
The text contained in RM Wiki is copyrighted (automatically, under the Bern Convention) by RM Wiki contributors and licensed to the public under the CC (by-nc-sa) license. The full text of this license is at creativecommons.org.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike License 3.0 Unported License or any later version published by the Creative Commons corporation. Content on RM Wiki is covered by disclaimers.
The English text of the CC (by-nc-sa) License is the only legally binding document between authors and users of RM Wiki content. What follows is our interpretation of the CC (by-nc-sa) License, as it pertains to the rights and obligations of users and contributors.
Contributors' rights and obligations
If you contribute material to RM Wiki, you thereby license it to the public under the CC (by-nc-sa) License. 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 CC (by-nc-sa) License, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under CC (by-nc-sa) 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 CC (by-nc-sa) License for the copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain under CC (by-nc-sa) License until they enter the public domain. (If the material has been previously published, you will need to verify permission.)
In the second case, if you incorporate external CC (by-nc-sa) License materials, as a requirement of the CC (by-nc-sa) 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 RM Wiki's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the CC (by-nc-sa) 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 RM Wiki, so long as you do not paraphrase the source too closely. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference.
Linking to copyrighted works
Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any RM Wiki 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, RM Wiki is not restricted to linking only to CC (by-nc-sa) License or open-source content.
However, 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. An example would be linking to a site hosting the lyrics of many popular songs without permission from their copyright holders. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States. Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on RM Wiki and its editors.
Context is also important; it may be acceptable to link to a bookseller website's page on a particular book, even if it presents an image of that book (such uses are generally either explicitly permitted by publishers or allowed under fair use). However, linking directly to an image of the book cover removes the context and the site's justification for permitted use or fair use.
Copyright violations
Contributors who repeatedly post copyrighted material despite appropriate warnings may be blocked from editing by any administrator to prevent further problems.
If you suspect a copyright violation, you should at least bring up the issue on that page's discussion page. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed. Some cases will be false alarms. For example, text that can be found elsewhere on the Web that was in fact copied from RM Wiki in the first place is not a copyright violation on RM Wiki's part.
If a page contains material which infringes copyright, that material – and the whole page, if there is no other material present – should be removed.
Image guidelines
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 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 an image to be used irrespective of any copyright claims.
Image description pages must be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images. Untagged or incorrectly-tagged images will be deleted.
Fair use materials and special requirements
All original RM Wiki text is distributed under the CC (by-nc-sa) License. RM Wiki 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 CC (by-nc-sa) License or public domain). In cases where no such images/sounds are currently available, then fair use may be used in certain circumstances.
In RM Wiki, 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 RM Wiki, of such "fair use" content retrieved from RM Wiki: this "fair use" content does not fall under the CC (by-nc-sa) License as such, but under the "fair use" (or similar/different) regulations in the country where the media are retrieved.
RM Wiki does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the CC (by-nc-sa) License but may require additional terms that we do not require for original RM Wiki text.
If you are the owner of RM Wiki-hosted content being used without your permission
If you are the owner of content that is being used on RM Wiki without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from RM Wiki. You may also blank the page and replace it with the words {{copyvio|''URL or place you published the text''}} 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.
Copied and adapted from the Wikipedia Copyrights (under GNU Free Documentation License).
