White Wolf:Dealing with possible copyright infringements

From the White Wolf Wiki, the most complete White Wolf reference

← White Wolf: Deletion Policy

Note: This policy is currently a work-in-progress, and is not yet in force.

One of the key goals of WWWiki is to provide an accurate, original reference source for White Wolf fans. Therefore, we take the possibility of copyright infringement very seriously. Material coming from external sources — that is, material that you have not written yourself — may only be submitted by the original author. In all such cases, it is important to cite your sources in a "Reference" section, and to explicitly state that you have granted permission for this material to be used on the article's talk page.

It is not the job of rank-and-file members of the WWWiki community to police every article for possible copyright infringements. However, from time to time you may come across an article that you believe may be infringing someone's copyright, or worse, is plagiarized from an unauthorized source. (Unauthorized sources are those which we know we are not allowed to copy from.)

Contents 1 Procedures 1.1 Exceptions for plagiarized works 1.2 Copyvios replacing valid content 2 Notice to copyright owners 3 Copyright infringement notices

[edit] Procedures

WWWiki's copyright policy explicitly provides for cases in which an article or other media posted to WWWiki violates someone's copyright. If you think an article or image is in violation of someone's copyright and does not constitute fair use, place one of the following boilerplate messages (listed below) on that page. Then list the page on possible copyright infringements. Pages should be listed there until a decision is made.

According to WWWiki's deletion policy, pages listed may be deleted after at least two additional votes for deletion have been cast, or alternatively after a waiting period of seven days. There is no upper limit to the length of time a page may be listed here, but it is preferable for potential copyright conflicts to be resolved quickly, so that the ugly boilerplate messages are not left on article pages.

In addition to listing a potential copyright violation, you could also:

• Replace the article's text with new (re-written) content of your own. You should do this on a temporary page (named [[PAGE NAME/temp]], for example) so that, when the previous version of the page is deleted, then the new version can simply be moved to take its place.
• Request permission by contacting the copyright owner. (This is of course not possible in cases of works owned by Paramount.) Oftentimes, an author or artist might be very pleased to see their work get more attention from a site like WWWiki! If you receive explicit permission to post work, it should be noted on the talk page that permission to use the copyright work has been granted.

[edit] Exceptions for plagiarized works

(This policy may be somewhat controversial. Please feel free to discuss it or suggest alternatives!)

In some cases, contributors who are unfamiliar with our policies may submit text that is copied directly from official Paramount sources — the Star Trek Encyclopedia is the most common source in this example. Once an article is listed on the possible copyright infringements page, it may be deleted immediately, at the discretion of the administrators. In such cases, a note should be left under the original listing, stating that the page was immediately deleted and for what reason.

Note that other plagiarized works — coming from fan websites, for example — do not qualify for immediate deletion. The only reason that copied Paramount works may be deleted immediately is because there is no chance of gaining permission to release the article text under the terms of the WWWiki copyright. In all other cases, some leeway should be granted to make it possible for the contributor(s) to obtain permission for the inclusion of the work.

[edit] Copyvios replacing valid content

In some cases, a contributor may replace valid article text with copyrighted text that does not belong in WWWiki. If this happens, it is acceptable to simply revert the changes back to a non-copyvio version of the text. The copyvio will remain in the page history, but will not be easily accessible to most readers (who are generally only interested in the current version of the text).

Articles which have a valid page history should not simply be deleted or replaced, because deleting the page will also wipe the history of contributions to that article — something which would be extraordinarily unfair to the contributors to that page.

If a copyright holder wishes to complain about a copyvio in a page history, it is possible for a developer to edit the database manually and delete individual page revisions based on that revision's OLDID identifier.

[edit] Notice to copyright owners

If you believe WWWiki is infringing your copyright, you may choose to raise the issue using this page and the standard copyright infringement notice as described below. Alternatively, you may choose to contact WWWiki's designated agent under the terms of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act.

Note that Archivists do not have the ability to remove copyright infringements from an article's page history. Therefore, if you believe that material in an article's page history infringes your copyright, you should contact an administrator or WWWiki's designated agent, rather than using this page.

[edit] Copyright infringement notices

Remove the text of the article, and replace it with the following boilerplate message.

For textual articles, use the following message:

{{copyvio}}

The original source of this text was believed to come from:

For images, use this message:

{{copyvioimage}}

Reason for belief of copyright infringement:

In both cases, append the URL of the original location of the work, as well as your signature, to the basic message.