Wikibooks:Fair use policy

Fair Use of both text and images is a legal grey area where you must use judgment and personal opinion as to if something qualifies as fair-use or not.

What is Fair Use

Generally the term fair use applies to personal use of copyrighted material. One common example of fair use is to be able to copy music on a vinyl album or compact disc onto your home computer or portable MP3 player. This still doesn't give you permission to share these computer files with your friends, however.

Instructors are also given special permission to copy some materials in limited quantities for direct instructional purposes. This is known as educational fair use and should not be an excuse for material used on Wikibooks.

Problems with Fair use

We suggest you to avoid fair use materials and use them only if you can find a good reason and cannot substitute them. Generally, more and more media is available at Wikimedia Commons - common repository of free media for all Wikimedia Projects and use of Commons should be a normal procedure. Wikimedia Commons does not permit fair use images within their collection.

Fair use law is exclusive to United States and countries with similar law systems. In most of the European countries works that fall into fair use in the US cannot be used at all or the number of conditions when fair use applies is substantially smaller. This is sometimes called fair dealing where scholarly use of copyrighted material may be used in limited situations. When you use fair use images in your book, many people from other countries won't be able to print it. Most of the purposes listed below as acceptable according to the Wikibooks narrower standard may be accepted in many more countries than solely the U.S., but you should still be aware of further restrictions. Get to know the laws governing fair use or fair dealing within your country if you use content like this or try to reproduce Wikibooks content in general.

What is Permitted on Wikibooks

To simplify the process of trying to determine if something qualifies as fair-use here on Wikibooks, only content which meets the following criteria will be allowed to stay on Wikibooks. We are not lawyers here and are not prepared to stay on the leading edge of legal theories and the latest court judgments and case law. The only real alternative is to simply ban fair use content on Wikibooks altogether, which has been done for some Wikimedia projects due to the complex issues involved.

Fair Use Text

Permitted Fair Use on Wikibooks for Text:

• Very short excerpts from a much larger work, usually just a few words or a single sentence or two.

Fair Use Images

Permitted Fair Use on Wikibooks for Images:

• Coat of Arms, Flags, Seals, etc. of administrative entities, political authorities and institutions

  These items are often protected by crown copyright or other similar legal protections, where copyright does not expire. As with company logos, it should be in some text that is specifically about the entity represented by the seal, or the seal itself. While this may seem like a violation of NPOV guidelines, you should be respectful when dealing with official symbols of various governments and not desecrate these symbols or use them in irreverent manners. Violating this standard is not only unethical, but can get you arrested even by countries other than the ones which these official symbols represent.

• Coins, Banknotes, Stamps

  These images should also be resized, partially covered, or otherwise changed to avoid counterfeiting laws. Adding text over the top of the image like Sample or Copy may be useful, or if you are pointing out features of the money, using arrows within the image that would otherwise ruin its value as legal tender may also be acceptable. Displaying stamps is often done by graphically "canceling" the image with usually a solid black line across the denomination value of the stamp or some other simple mark that still leaves most of the image available for viewing.

• Company Logos and trademarks

  Logos are permissible only for modules that are specifically about the company or product whose trademark is being used. Under no condition should endorsement be implied by the use of the logo, which would be an inappropriate use. A formal disclaimer is suggested within the text (perhaps as a footnote) to acknowledge the appropriate owner of the trademark.

• Software Screenshots

  It is important that these screen shots be of significantly lower resolution than would be found on the computer screen (10% of the original pixel size or even considerably less) and that the screen capture is there to illustrate a specific point you are trying to make within the text you are writing. Rather than a full screen capture, you may even want to only display a small portion of the screen instead. Using these screen shots should not be done for decorative purposes simply to have some graphical elements in the content of the Wikibook.

What is not accepted on Wikibooks

• Large amount of text copied from other websites.
• Images used for decorative purpose.
• Parody applications of fair use. While funny and considered legal, fiction is not appropriate for Wikibooks as defined in Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks. You may instead want to consider the Uncyclopedia for content like this.

External References about Fair Use

• Article on Wikipedia
• Wikipedia Fair Use Guidelines
• Italian Wikibooks Copyright Policies
• Wikipedia Fair Use Criteria
• United States Law about copyright (note section 107 that is specifically about fair-use)