MozillaZine Knowledge Base:Copyrights

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The license MozillaZine Knowledge Base uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, MozillaZine Knowledge Base 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 MozillaZine Knowledge Base article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). MozillaZine Knowledge Base 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 MozillaZine Knowledge Base is licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the FSF; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
Content on MozillaZine Knowledge Base is covered by the General Disclaimer.

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

IMPORTANT: If you want to use content from MozillaZine Knowledge Base, read the GNU Free Documentation License.

Users' rights and obligations

If you want to use MozillaZine Knowledge Base materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GFDL. If you are simply duplicating the MozillaZine Knowledge Base article, you must follow section two of the GFDL on verbatim copying.

If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this 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 MozillaZine Knowledge Base article is its wiki text.)

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the MozillaZine Knowledge Base article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that MozillaZine Knowledge Base makes no guarantee to retain authorship information and a transparent copy of articles. Therefore, you are encouraged to provide this authorship information and a transparent copy with your derived works.

Example notice

An example notice for a document that uses the MozillaZine Knowledge Base article Profile backup might read as follows:

This document is licensed under the <a href="http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/fdl.html">GNU Free Documentation License</a>. It uses material from the <a href="http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile backup">MozillaZine Knowledge Base article "Profile backup"</a>.

("Profile backup" and the MozillaZine Knowledge Base URL must of course be substituted accordingly.)

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

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to MozillaZine Knowledge Base, 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 MozillaZine Knowledge Base article; it is however very desirable to replace GFDL texts with invariant sections by original content without invariant sections whenever possible.

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 MozillaZine Knowledge Base'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. 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 a work, reformulate it in your own words, and submit it to MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

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.

If you find a copyright infringement

It is not the job of rank-and-file MozillaZine Knowledge Basens to police every article for possible copyright infringement, but if you suspect one, 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 GFDL. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on the Web that was copied from MozillaZine Knowledge Base. 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.

Original text available at Wikipedia. Content taken through and available under the GNU FDL.