WikiJava:License

From WikiJava

Unless specified all the contents of WikiJava are under the WikiJava:GFDL free license.

Important note: WikiJava does not own copyright on article texts and illustrations. It is therefore useless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce content. Permission to reproduce content under the license and technical conditions applicable to WikiJava has already been granted to everyone without request; for permission to use it outside these terms, one must contact all the volunteer authors of the text or illustration in question.

The license WikiJava uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as wikipedia:free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as wikipedia:copyleft. That is to say, WikiJava 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 WikiJava article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). WikiJava articles therefore will remain free under the GFDL 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 WikiJava is copyrighted (automatically under the Berne Convention) by WikiJava contributors and licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at Text of the GNU Free Documentation License. This text must not be changed.

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 Wikipedia:Free Software Foundation; 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 Wikipedia is covered by disclaimers.

The English 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 reuse content from WikiJava, first read the Reusers' rights and obligations section. You should then read the GNU Free Documentation License.

Contents 1 Contributors' rights and obligations 1.1 Using copyrighted work from others 1.2 Linking to copyrighted works 1.3 Copyright violations 2 Reusers' rights and obligations 3 Guideline to explicitly specify your license in a page

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to WikiJava, 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 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 GFDL, for instance because the material is in the wikipedia: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 copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain under GFDL until they enter the Wikipedia:public domain.

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.

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 WikiJava's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the GFDL or in the Wikipedia: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 article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to WikiJava. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference. See Wikipedia:plagiarism and Wikipedia: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 WikiJava 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, Wikipedia is not restricted to linking only to GFDL-free 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. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement. Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on WikiJava and its editors.

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 WikiJava in the first place is not a copyright violation – at least not on WikiJava'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.

Reusers' rights and obligations

If you want to use WikiJava 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 WikiJava article, you must follow 2. VERBATIM COPYING|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 WikiJava article is any of a number of formats available from us, including the wiki text, the html web pages, xml feed, etc.)

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the WikiJava article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that WikiJava 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.

Guideline to explicitly specify your license in a page

If you want to specify inside a page that its content go under the GPL license, you can simply use the following string in your page:

{{GFDL_everywhere}}. 

This will import generate in your page a text box as the following:

This article is under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2. you may read the complete text of the license in this page Please read http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html for details about the license