This is an
information page. It is not one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of
consensus and
vetting. |
There are at least three issues to be considered: Image
Fair use is a legal doctrine which provides that for certain classes of use of (non-free) copyrighted material – such as for educational, criticism, news reporting and other purposes – there is an exception to the rule that the material cannot be used without infringing on the owner's copyright, even though you don't have their permission. Certain standards must be met to fall within the bounds of the doctrine's exception.
The most common way fair use comes into play here is in direct quotations. When you see a quote in an article from some source and that source is not in the public domain or freely-licensed, we're using that copyrighted text without the owner's permission, under a claim of fair use. I won't get into the details of the standard too deeply, but suffice it to say that you can't use too much of the work under fair use, so the rule of thumb is short quotations are generally okay, and large ones are probably not. For images (and other media files), we have a set of the standards that a work must meet in order for it to be properly claimed as fair use here, that are provided at Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria. It can be complicated but to summarize some salient points from them that come up a lot:
This is an
information page. It is not one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of
consensus and
vetting. |
There are at least three issues to be considered: Image
Fair use is a legal doctrine which provides that for certain classes of use of (non-free) copyrighted material – such as for educational, criticism, news reporting and other purposes – there is an exception to the rule that the material cannot be used without infringing on the owner's copyright, even though you don't have their permission. Certain standards must be met to fall within the bounds of the doctrine's exception.
The most common way fair use comes into play here is in direct quotations. When you see a quote in an article from some source and that source is not in the public domain or freely-licensed, we're using that copyrighted text without the owner's permission, under a claim of fair use. I won't get into the details of the standard too deeply, but suffice it to say that you can't use too much of the work under fair use, so the rule of thumb is short quotations are generally okay, and large ones are probably not. For images (and other media files), we have a set of the standards that a work must meet in order for it to be properly claimed as fair use here, that are provided at Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria. It can be complicated but to summarize some salient points from them that come up a lot: