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SmallBusiness.com:Copyrights
Important note: SmallBusiness.com, nor its users, claim ownership of the copyright of the text and illustrations appearing in SmallBusiness.com entries (the articles and other content that appear on every SmallBusiness.com page that can be edited by registered users). Therefore, there is NO NEED to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce content found in SmallBusiness.com entries if you follow the specific guidelines regarding attribution and linking to the entry on SmallBusiness.com that you reproduce (see explanatory note regarding exception in next paragraph). It is possible to reproduce content under the license and technical conditions applicable to SmallBusiness.com appearing below. The permissions to reproduce SmallBusiness.com's content in accordance with these conditions are granted without request.
What the owner of this site DOES own: There are exceptions to the note above. The owner of SmallBusiness.com does own the copyright and control of the site's name and web address URL, its logo and the navigational graphics and other material that appears on the site. The owner also controls the usage of the brand and trademark SmallBusiness.com for any and all commercial or promotional activity.
Information for re-users of content from SmallBusiness.com
You can re-use content from SmallBusiness.com entries freely, with the exception of content that is used under "fair use" exemptions, or similar exemptions of copyright law. Please follow the guidelines below:
- Attribution: To re-distribute a text page in any form, provide credit to the authors by including a hyperlink or URL to the SmallBusiness.com page or pages you are re-using. Text from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which we will strive to indicate clearly to you. For example, we have tried to include a link under the sub-category External links whenever content in the entry was originally published on another site granting Copyleft/Share Alike rights (see next point). Where such notations are visible on a SmallBusiness.com page, they should be preserved by re-users.
- Copyleft/Share Alike: If you make modifications or additions to the page you re-use, you must license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 or later.
- Indicate changes: If you make modifications or additions, you must indicate in a reasonable fashion that the original work has been modified. If you are re-using the page in a wiki, for example, indicating this in the page history is sufficient.
- Licensing notice: Each copy or modified version that you distribute must include a licensing notice stating that the work is released under CC-BY-SA and either a) a hyperlink or URL to the text of the license or b) a copy of the license. For this purpose, a suitable URL is: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
- For further information, please refer to the legal code of the CC-BY-SA License.
Information for text contributors to SmallBusiness.com
To grow the commons of free knowledge and free culture, all users contributing to SmallBusiness.com are required to grant broad permissions to the general public to re-distribute and re-use their contributions freely, as long as the use is attributed and the same freedom to re-use and re-distribute applies to any derivative works. Therefore, for any text you hold the copyright to, by submitting it, you agree to license it under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 (Unported). Please note that these licenses do allow commercial uses of your contributions, as long as such uses are compliant with the terms.
As an author, you agree to be attributed in any of the following fashions: a) through a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the article or articles you contributed to, b) through a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) through a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.)
Importing text
If you want to import text that you have found elsewhere or that you have co-authored with others, you can only do so if it is available under terms that are compatible with the CC-BY-SA license. You do not need to ensure or guarantee that the imported text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Furthermore, please note that you cannot import information which is available only under the GFDL. In other words, you may only import text that is (a) single-licensed under terms compatible with the CC-BY-SA license or (b) dual-licensed with the GFDL and another license with terms compatible with the CC-BY-SA license
If you import text under a compatible license which requires attribution, you must, in a reasonable fashion, credit the author(s). Where such credit is commonly given through page histories (such as SmallBusiness.com-internal copying), it is sufficient to give attribution in the edit summary, which is recorded in the page history, when importing the text. Regardless of the license, the text you import may be rejected if the required attribution is deemed too intrusive.
Using copyrighted work from others
All works are copyrighted unless they either 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 SmallBusiness.com's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the GFDL or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use. See SmallBusiness.com:Boilerplate request for permission for a form letter asking a copyright holder to grant us a license to use their work under terms of the GFDL.
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 SmallBusiness.com. 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 SmallBusiness.com 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, SmallBusiness.com is not restricted to linking only to 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 SmallBusiness.com and its editors.
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 license. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on theweb that was copied from SmallBusiness.com. 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.
If all of the content of a page is a suspected copyright infringement, then the page should be listed on SmallBusiness.com:Copyright problems and the content of the page replaced by the standard notice which you can find there. If, after a week, the page still appears to be a copyright infringement, then it may be deleted following the procedures on the votes page.
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 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 a photograph to be used.
Image description pages must be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images, as described at SmallBusiness.com:Image copyright tags. Untagged or incorrectly-tagged images will be deleted. It is currently unclear what should happen in cases where the same image has been uploaded more than once with different respective copyright statements.
U.S. government photographs
Works produced by civilian and military employees of the United States federal government in the scope of their employment are public domain by statute.
However, not every work republished by the U.S. government falls into this category. The U.S. government can own copyrights that are assigned to it by others -- for example, works created by contractors.
Moreover, images and other media found on .mil and .gov websites may be using commercial stock photography owned by others. It may be useful to check the privacy and security notice of the website, but only with an email to the webmaster can you be confident that an image is in the public domain.
It should also be noted that governments outside the U.S. often do claim copyright over works produced by their employees for example, Crown copyright in the United Kingdom. Also, most state and local governments in the United States do not place their work into the public domain and do in fact own the copyright to their work. Please be careful to check copyright information before copying.
Source
United States Code; Title 17; Chapter 1; § 105 Subject matter of copyright; United States Government works.
Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.
[US Code]
Reusers' rights and obligations
- Attribution: To re-distribute a text page in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.) This applies to text developed by the Wikimedia community. Text from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which we will strive to indicate clearly to you. For example, a page may have a banner or other notation indicating that some or all of its content was originally published somewhere else. Where such notations are visible in the page itself, they should generally be preserved by re-users.
- Copyleft/Share Alike: If you make modifications or additions to the page you re-use, you must license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 or later.
- Indicate changes: If you make modifications or additions, you must indicate in a reasonable fashion that the original work has been modified. If you are re-using the page in a wiki, for example, indicating this in the page history is sufficient.
- Licensing notice: Each copy or modified version that you distribute must include a licensing notice stating that the work is released under CC-BY-SA and either a) a hyperlink or URL to the text of the license or b) a copy of the license. For this purpose, a suitable URL is: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
- For further information, please refer to the legal code of the CC-BY-SA License.
