JargonWiki:Copyrights
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JargonWiki Copyright Policy
Unless otherwise indicated, it is standard JargonWiki policy that all content on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License version 3.0 and is the property of its original author, per the stipulations of that license. Therefore user contributions to this site remain the property of those users who submit it.
There are some exceptions to this general policy. They include:
Exception One: The Public Domain
Pages containing articles originally based largely upon content in the public domain remain in the public domain, regardless of edits, changes, and contributions made by JargonWiki users. This constitutes an exception to the standard JargonWiki policy governing the intellectual property ownership rights of user contributions to articles that appear on JargonWiki. Thus as a condition of the editing privileges of those particular pages, any and all user contributions to those pages that contain articles originally based largely upon content in the public domain are also automatically and immediately dedicated to the public domain rather than falling under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License version 3.0, to which user contributions are subject by default. JargonWiki administrators believe that this is the only reasonable way to handle the issue, as having multiple licenses within a single article on a single page is untenable, because:
- It would be distracting and confusing to the reader to have a number of different copyright notices appearing throughout the course of an article.
- It would add another large and difficult to manage layer of metadata complexity to the storage requirements of each article and even each edit (e.g. "was this a public domain edit or a Creative Commons edit?")
- It would add a concurrently large management responsibility to each article, as JargonWiki administrators would be required to record, sort, and maintain the various licenses for the various parts of the article.
- It simply doesn't scale.
When a JargonWiki user makes a contribution to an article that contains content in the public domain, there are two different potential levels of legal protection for the intellectual property that ultimately results from such a contribution:
- First, the public domain legal standard for the original content in the article
- Second the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License that applies by default to all user contributions to JargonWiki and therefore would cover the user contributions the article
In order to resolve this, it is the policy of JargonWiki that any contributions by users to articles based substantially upon content in the public domain will automatically and immediately be themselves dedicated to the public domain, as well. This will resolve the issues identified above that surround articles which contain content that could potentially be subject to multiple, disparate licenses. This will also ensure that neither JargonWiki nor any of its users claim ownership of intellectual property that they have no legal rights to, specifically intellectual property in the public domain. This policy is intentionally conservative; when there is doubt as to the appropriate legal protection it aims to err on the side of the previously established license, rather than any that might be newly created through user contributions or through the interpretation of JargonWiki policy.
Articles based largely upon intellectual property in the public domain and that therefore fall under the above policy governing user contributions to articles based upon content in the public domain are marked with the following:
| Public Domain
This article is in the public domain and is not subject to copyright, trademark, or any other legal protection of intellectual property. | 
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Exception Two: The GNU Free Documentation License
Articles that appear within JargonWiki but are based upon content which is subject to the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL) constitute another exception to the standard JargonWiki policy detailed above. User contributions to articles that are originally based substantially upon content subject to the GNU FDL will, in turn, be subject to the GNU FDL version 1.2, rather than the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License version 3.0, to which user contributions are subject by default as a provision of JargonWiki's intellectual property and copyright policy. The reasons for this are similar to the ones given above which detail why user contributions to articles based upon content in the public domain are themselves in turn dedicated to the public domain as a matter of JargonWiki policy. Specifically, they have to do with the clarity, manageability, and portability of individual articles, and with the scalability of the JargonWiki as a whole.
Content subject to the GNU Free Documentation License is marked with the following:
| GNU Free Documentation License
This article is subject to the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2. | 
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Exception Three: The GNU General Public License
Software created or adapted specifically for JargonWiki by the project administrators is subject to the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) version 3.0. Users are free to copy and adapt this software in turn for their own uses, per the stipulations of the GNU GPL. However, no user contributions to the software that powers JargonWiki will be accepted. As such, no user submissions or contributions will be subject to the GNU GPL.
Content subject to the GNU General Public License is marked with the following:
| GNU General Public License
This article is subject to the GNU General Public License version 3.0. |
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Summary
Keeping track of an arbitrary number of licenses for an exponentially increasing number of articles and edits to articles is simply unmanageable and doesn't scale. Therefore, each article on the JargonWiki will be subject to a single license which dictates the intellectual property rights governing that article. Any user contributions to that article will be subject to the license which covers the entire, original article. Where there is no clear indication of the license governing the source material for a particular article, or where the article itself is a product of a user, the default license that will be applied is the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. Unless otherwise indicated, all content on the JargonWiki is subject to that license.
