Wikipedia's best articles are often enhanced by images. Indeed, the featured article criteria ask for "images and other media where appropriate" and that, as for the use of all images in Wikipedia, they should have " acceptable copyright status. Non-free images or media must satisfy the criteria for inclusion of non-free content and be labeled accordingly." Similarly, the good article criteria require that images be " tagged with their copyright status" and that valid fair use rationales be provided for non-free content.
Images on Wikipedia are classified as either "free" or "non-free":
This dispatch discusses free images, and explains how to ascertain whether or not an image is actually free. A future Dispatch will cover the use of non-free images.
Although all Wikipedia content is expected to have acceptable copyright status, featured article candidates receive particular scrutiny for compliance with the image usage policy. Examining image licenses is not always straightforward. Ultimately, it is a matter of confirming that a copyright tag is present and that the information provided is sufficient to corroborate the tag that has been selected.
Copyright is a legal protection granting the creator of an original work – for our purposes here, an image – exclusive rights to that work. These rights prevent others from copying, redistributing or modifying the image without the author's permission. Copyright is generated automatically on the creation of such a work.
Copyright holders may choose to relinquish some or all of their rights, for example, by licensing their image so that others may copy, redistribute, or modify it without seeking permission. Such licenses are typically called " copyleft" licenses – a play on the word "copyright". Copyleft images are still under copyright; their creators have merely waived some, but not all of the protection that copyright affords them.
Commonly used licenses include:
Works in the public domain are not owned, controlled or otherwise restricted by any person, entity or law in a given jurisdiction. A public domain image may be freely used, altered and published by the public at large without condition.
Generally, an image enters the public domain when it is no longer eligible for copyright protection, usually a certain number of years after its first publication or after its creator's death. The length of time before copyright protection lapses varies greatly from country to country. Because the Wikimedia Foundation servers are located in Florida, images used on the Wikipedia must be in the public domain in the United States. [1] Non-US images hosted on Wikipedia are not required to be public domain in their country of origin provided that they are public domain in the United States. Images hosted on the Wikimedia Commons, by contrast, must be public domain in both the United States and their country of origin; compliance with Commons policy, however, does not figure in the FA or GA criteria.
Copyright terms in the US vary according to several conditions. The most common encountered on Wikipedia are:
An image may also be voluntarily released to the public domain by its copyright holder or, in certain cases, may not be eligible for protection in the first place.
Article reviewers generally need to take into account three aspects:
Wikipedia's image usage policy requires all images to have three pieces of information:
1. A copyright tag is a template, typically rectangular and appearing towards the bottom of an image page. The tag indicates the image's license or, if public domain, the reason the image is no longer eligible for copyright protection. The {{ GFDL}} copyright tag, for example, appears as follows:
![]() | 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 Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. |
![]() ![]() ![]() | If this file is
eligible for relicensing, it may also be used under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. The relicensing status of this image has not yet been reviewed. You can help. |
![]() |
2. A verifiable source can be in the form of a simple weblink, citation for the published work from which the image was scanned or the name and method of contact for the author. The format and location of sourcing information on an image description page may vary. Optimally, images will use the {{ Information}} template, which provides organized source and summary information. This template is not mandatory, however, and the information may be "hidden" within template boilerplate ( example), if present at all.
3. An image summary provides the "necessary details to support the use of the image copyright tag". WP:IUP recommends the following:
After confirming the presence of the three required elements, reviewers should also examine the source provided. Like prose quotations or statistics, images should have verifiable and reliable sourcing. By their very nature, image copyright tags (especially those claiming public domain) are "material challenged or likely to be challenged" and, consequently, subject to Wikipedia's verifiability policy ( WP:V) and the necessity of utilizing reliable sources ( WP:RS).
Consider, for example, the following copyright tag:
![]() | This file is in the
public domain because its copyright has expired in the United States and those countries with a copyright term of no more than the life of the author plus 100 years.
|
An image employing this copyright tag would be expected to have a reliable source explicitly indicating the author's date of death or dating the image such that no reasonable scenario would contradict the claim (e.g. the author of a painting dated 1740 could not possibly have been dead less than 100 years).
The following are examples of correctly formatted, verifiable and reliable sourcing:
WP:V notes that "the appropriateness of any source always depends on the context". A Geocities site, for example, claiming that an image is public domain will probably not be considered sufficiently reliable to support the claim. Institutional and research sites (e.g. libraries, museums and archival sites such as the Library of Congress) are generally the most reliable.
Copyright law is often nuanced and esoteric; consequently, there are many concepts of which image authors and uploaders may not be aware. "Derivative works" and "freedom of panorama", two such concepts, can be counter-intuitive and, as such, are a common cause of unintentional copyright violations.
A derivative work is a copy, translation or alteration of an existing work – for example, a scan of a page in a book or a picture of a stuffed animal. The Wikimedia Commons' derivative works guideline contains an example situation which explains the dilemma such images pose to Wikipedia:
By taking a picture with a copyrighted cartoon character on a t-shirt as its main subject, for example, the photographer creates a new, copyrighted work (the photograph), but the rights of the cartoon character's creator still affect the resulting photograph. Such a photograph could not be published without the consent of both copyright holders: the photographer and the cartoonist.
Wikipedians or external sources may believe in good faith that a scan, photograph, or screenshot that they have made is an entirely original work, thinking that, because they themselves made the scan or took the photograph, the resulting image is "self-made" and, thus, "free". This is not necessarily the case. Reviewers should consider whether the subject of the image is under copyright – a consideration independent of the copyright status of the image itself. [2]
Although not mandatory, derivative images will, ideally, have summaries identifying the copyright status of both the image and its subject. The image to the right, for example, contains a secondary copyright tag for the fountain/statue. In its case, the image as a whole is "free" and acceptable on Wikipedia, as the subject is demonstrably in the public domain. Alternatively, consider an image of a Batman action figure. Although the image itself could have any copyleft license, the image as a whole would still not be acceptable on Wikipedia, as the figure has not been published with a "free" license.
Freedom of panorama is a copyright law provision that allows for photographs of works (e.g. buildings and sculptures) permanently installed in public places to be freely published, even if the works are still under copyright. Although such an image is still a derivative work (i.e. a translation of an existing work), it does not infringe the rights of the work's author in countries with freedom of panorama. In other countries, however, the derivative image requires consent of the subject's author to be freely licensed.
The United States does not have freedom of panorama, although pictures of buildings are exempt. [3] Hence "self-made" images of publicly-situated works in the United States require consent of the subject's author, as described above. This revision of an image depicting Jaume Piensa's Crown Fountain in Chicago, for example, is incorrectly tagged. As a photograph taken in a country without freedom of panorama (the USA), it would require the permission of the fountain's creator for it to be published with a CC or GFDL license.
"Self made" images are generally those which are uploaded by their authors (i.e. Wikipedian-created images). In addition to checking for the policy-mandated elements, it is helpful to consider several aspects pertaining to provenance:
Reviewing images requires common sense. Consideration of provenance is an art, not a science, and the above notes should not necessarily be used as a "checklist". Whereas any one of these considerations may be meaningless by itself, a combination of issues may bring the validity of an image into question. A talk page note to the uploader asking for clarification or a Google images search, for example, may be appropriate or necessary to be more confident that image is indeed "self-made".
The "self-made" image pictured to the right (as of this version) is in full compliance with Wikipedia policy and properly licensed.
The "self-made" image pictured to the right (as of this version) is in not in compliance with Wikipedia image policy.
The verifiable source and image summary elements can, in many "self-made" cases, be reasonably treated as one thing. The uploader (i.e. presumed author) would really only need to add a statement to the effect of "Author: J. Ash Bowie" to the summary to resolve the issue.
Already published images are those which have been obtained from external websites, published works or are otherwise not the authorship of the uploading Wikipedian. Provenance considerations for these images include:
The image pictured to the right (as of this version) is in full compliance with Wikipedia policy and properly licensed.
The image on the right (as of this version) is in not in compliance with Wikipedia image policy.
Although this is likely public domain, verifiability, not truth, is the threshold for inclusion. Without a source confirming the author, this image could just as easily be a contemporary work.
Wikipedia's best articles are often enhanced by images. Indeed, the featured article criteria ask for "images and other media where appropriate" and that, as for the use of all images in Wikipedia, they should have " acceptable copyright status. Non-free images or media must satisfy the criteria for inclusion of non-free content and be labeled accordingly." Similarly, the good article criteria require that images be " tagged with their copyright status" and that valid fair use rationales be provided for non-free content.
Images on Wikipedia are classified as either "free" or "non-free":
This dispatch discusses free images, and explains how to ascertain whether or not an image is actually free. A future Dispatch will cover the use of non-free images.
Although all Wikipedia content is expected to have acceptable copyright status, featured article candidates receive particular scrutiny for compliance with the image usage policy. Examining image licenses is not always straightforward. Ultimately, it is a matter of confirming that a copyright tag is present and that the information provided is sufficient to corroborate the tag that has been selected.
Copyright is a legal protection granting the creator of an original work – for our purposes here, an image – exclusive rights to that work. These rights prevent others from copying, redistributing or modifying the image without the author's permission. Copyright is generated automatically on the creation of such a work.
Copyright holders may choose to relinquish some or all of their rights, for example, by licensing their image so that others may copy, redistribute, or modify it without seeking permission. Such licenses are typically called " copyleft" licenses – a play on the word "copyright". Copyleft images are still under copyright; their creators have merely waived some, but not all of the protection that copyright affords them.
Commonly used licenses include:
Works in the public domain are not owned, controlled or otherwise restricted by any person, entity or law in a given jurisdiction. A public domain image may be freely used, altered and published by the public at large without condition.
Generally, an image enters the public domain when it is no longer eligible for copyright protection, usually a certain number of years after its first publication or after its creator's death. The length of time before copyright protection lapses varies greatly from country to country. Because the Wikimedia Foundation servers are located in Florida, images used on the Wikipedia must be in the public domain in the United States. [1] Non-US images hosted on Wikipedia are not required to be public domain in their country of origin provided that they are public domain in the United States. Images hosted on the Wikimedia Commons, by contrast, must be public domain in both the United States and their country of origin; compliance with Commons policy, however, does not figure in the FA or GA criteria.
Copyright terms in the US vary according to several conditions. The most common encountered on Wikipedia are:
An image may also be voluntarily released to the public domain by its copyright holder or, in certain cases, may not be eligible for protection in the first place.
Article reviewers generally need to take into account three aspects:
Wikipedia's image usage policy requires all images to have three pieces of information:
1. A copyright tag is a template, typically rectangular and appearing towards the bottom of an image page. The tag indicates the image's license or, if public domain, the reason the image is no longer eligible for copyright protection. The {{ GFDL}} copyright tag, for example, appears as follows:
![]() | 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 Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. |
![]() ![]() ![]() | If this file is
eligible for relicensing, it may also be used under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. The relicensing status of this image has not yet been reviewed. You can help. |
![]() |
2. A verifiable source can be in the form of a simple weblink, citation for the published work from which the image was scanned or the name and method of contact for the author. The format and location of sourcing information on an image description page may vary. Optimally, images will use the {{ Information}} template, which provides organized source and summary information. This template is not mandatory, however, and the information may be "hidden" within template boilerplate ( example), if present at all.
3. An image summary provides the "necessary details to support the use of the image copyright tag". WP:IUP recommends the following:
After confirming the presence of the three required elements, reviewers should also examine the source provided. Like prose quotations or statistics, images should have verifiable and reliable sourcing. By their very nature, image copyright tags (especially those claiming public domain) are "material challenged or likely to be challenged" and, consequently, subject to Wikipedia's verifiability policy ( WP:V) and the necessity of utilizing reliable sources ( WP:RS).
Consider, for example, the following copyright tag:
![]() | This file is in the
public domain because its copyright has expired in the United States and those countries with a copyright term of no more than the life of the author plus 100 years.
|
An image employing this copyright tag would be expected to have a reliable source explicitly indicating the author's date of death or dating the image such that no reasonable scenario would contradict the claim (e.g. the author of a painting dated 1740 could not possibly have been dead less than 100 years).
The following are examples of correctly formatted, verifiable and reliable sourcing:
WP:V notes that "the appropriateness of any source always depends on the context". A Geocities site, for example, claiming that an image is public domain will probably not be considered sufficiently reliable to support the claim. Institutional and research sites (e.g. libraries, museums and archival sites such as the Library of Congress) are generally the most reliable.
Copyright law is often nuanced and esoteric; consequently, there are many concepts of which image authors and uploaders may not be aware. "Derivative works" and "freedom of panorama", two such concepts, can be counter-intuitive and, as such, are a common cause of unintentional copyright violations.
A derivative work is a copy, translation or alteration of an existing work – for example, a scan of a page in a book or a picture of a stuffed animal. The Wikimedia Commons' derivative works guideline contains an example situation which explains the dilemma such images pose to Wikipedia:
By taking a picture with a copyrighted cartoon character on a t-shirt as its main subject, for example, the photographer creates a new, copyrighted work (the photograph), but the rights of the cartoon character's creator still affect the resulting photograph. Such a photograph could not be published without the consent of both copyright holders: the photographer and the cartoonist.
Wikipedians or external sources may believe in good faith that a scan, photograph, or screenshot that they have made is an entirely original work, thinking that, because they themselves made the scan or took the photograph, the resulting image is "self-made" and, thus, "free". This is not necessarily the case. Reviewers should consider whether the subject of the image is under copyright – a consideration independent of the copyright status of the image itself. [2]
Although not mandatory, derivative images will, ideally, have summaries identifying the copyright status of both the image and its subject. The image to the right, for example, contains a secondary copyright tag for the fountain/statue. In its case, the image as a whole is "free" and acceptable on Wikipedia, as the subject is demonstrably in the public domain. Alternatively, consider an image of a Batman action figure. Although the image itself could have any copyleft license, the image as a whole would still not be acceptable on Wikipedia, as the figure has not been published with a "free" license.
Freedom of panorama is a copyright law provision that allows for photographs of works (e.g. buildings and sculptures) permanently installed in public places to be freely published, even if the works are still under copyright. Although such an image is still a derivative work (i.e. a translation of an existing work), it does not infringe the rights of the work's author in countries with freedom of panorama. In other countries, however, the derivative image requires consent of the subject's author to be freely licensed.
The United States does not have freedom of panorama, although pictures of buildings are exempt. [3] Hence "self-made" images of publicly-situated works in the United States require consent of the subject's author, as described above. This revision of an image depicting Jaume Piensa's Crown Fountain in Chicago, for example, is incorrectly tagged. As a photograph taken in a country without freedom of panorama (the USA), it would require the permission of the fountain's creator for it to be published with a CC or GFDL license.
"Self made" images are generally those which are uploaded by their authors (i.e. Wikipedian-created images). In addition to checking for the policy-mandated elements, it is helpful to consider several aspects pertaining to provenance:
Reviewing images requires common sense. Consideration of provenance is an art, not a science, and the above notes should not necessarily be used as a "checklist". Whereas any one of these considerations may be meaningless by itself, a combination of issues may bring the validity of an image into question. A talk page note to the uploader asking for clarification or a Google images search, for example, may be appropriate or necessary to be more confident that image is indeed "self-made".
The "self-made" image pictured to the right (as of this version) is in full compliance with Wikipedia policy and properly licensed.
The "self-made" image pictured to the right (as of this version) is in not in compliance with Wikipedia image policy.
The verifiable source and image summary elements can, in many "self-made" cases, be reasonably treated as one thing. The uploader (i.e. presumed author) would really only need to add a statement to the effect of "Author: J. Ash Bowie" to the summary to resolve the issue.
Already published images are those which have been obtained from external websites, published works or are otherwise not the authorship of the uploading Wikipedian. Provenance considerations for these images include:
The image pictured to the right (as of this version) is in full compliance with Wikipedia policy and properly licensed.
The image on the right (as of this version) is in not in compliance with Wikipedia image policy.
Although this is likely public domain, verifiability, not truth, is the threshold for inclusion. Without a source confirming the author, this image could just as easily be a contemporary work.
Discuss this story
Question
<Question below copied from this inline>
Everything in the walkthrough section is clear and easy to understand, but I'm left wondering how I was supposed to learn/know all of this and which Wiki Page I would go to if I want to learn more. Can there be a Seealso at the top of each section? How would I have learned this info without this tutorial? --— Preceding unsigned comment added by SandyGeorgia ( talk • contribs)
Question II
<Question below copied from [1] inline>
Regarding "The image usage policy (WP:IUP) requires an image to have three pieces of information": All images? On Commons and on Wiki? Is there a difference ? --— Preceding unsigned comment added by SandyGeorgia ( talk • contribs)
Free / Non-Free
I see you've decided to restrict your discussion here to free images. I do hope you'll do a follow-up on non-free images. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 08:49, 30 July 2008 (UTC) reply
screenshots
Some screenshots of image license pages might be good. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 09:23, 30 July 2008 (UTC) reply
here's a thing
What about licenses such as the one on this image or even this one. They seem fine to me, but they are neither CC nor GFDL. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 20:22, 30 July 2008 (UTC) reply
Provenience
What is this?
Unfinished ? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 01:39, 11 August 2008 (UTC) reply
LoC example
You give the LoC as an example of a reliable site for information about whether or not a work is in public domain. In my experience, however, they don't necessarily give that information. I've been trying to confirm that this image (also found here, by the way) is public domain, for instance, and frankly can't find any verification that it is so, though it would seem almost certainly the case. Specifically, I have no idea of when it was published, either in the USA (if it was) or in France, when the lithographer died (or even necessarily who the lithographer was), or if it is a copy (derivative work) of some prior painting. Incidentally, any clues would be magnificent! -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 16:25, 12 August 2008 (UTC) reply
CC
Re. this edit (and the "common misperceptions" section), would it be possible to list all the acceptable (and perhaps even unacceptable) licenses? For instance, would I be right in saying that the following (and only the following?) are acceptable:
And the following are unacceptable:
Is this a full list? -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 16:32, 12 August 2008 (UTC) reply
Well, CC licenses can also add country "modules" (e.g. DE, IN, etc.) to indicate country of publication/origin (e.g. CC-by-DE as a German-specific variant), but I don't think that's really necessary to articlate here. So yes, that would be a complete list.
Comprehensive this dispatch is not (partly why I wanted to split to three); it is very much "101" and stays quite general, so it seems odd to me to include such detail. The dispatch mentions, in several places, that free images need to be licensed to allow derivatives and commercial use. Given that the meanings of NC and ND are articulated, it seems unnecessary to elaborate further. I'm also trying to avoid re-inventing the wheel; pages like Wikipedia:Image copyright tags/Comprehensive, although quite out-dated, are already there to lay out the gambit of copyright tags. Part of me feels too much elaboration can even be condescending (i.e. is it disrespectful of our readers' intelligence to assume they can't put two and two together?) Ultimately, however, this dispatch needs to help people and if expanding the CC licenses is really necessary to do that, then let's. ЭLСОВВОLД talk 20:12, 12 August 2008 (UTC) reply
Comments from Awadewit
I hope these suggestions help. Awadewit ( talk) 00:01, 13 August 2008 (UTC) reply
Great dispatch
Very informative. I consider myself well-versed in matters of copyright, but I learned a new point or two from this dispatch. I agree that this Dispatch would become a great reference in the future. :-) -- seav ( talk) 10:12, 13 August 2008 (UTC) reply
taking/publishing
FU images
Hi, the people at NFC are quite insistent that there's no such thing as a fair-use image; only non-free. A fair-use justification is sometimes upheld. Tony (talk) 13:27, 16 August 2008 (UTC) reply