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The goal of Wikipedia is to create an information source in an encyclopedia format that is freely available. The license we use (see below) grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the recipient grants the same freedoms to others using their version and they acknowledge Wikipedia as the source. See below for specifics on how to do this.

The realities of modern copyright law demand that we pay attention to legal issues to ensure that our work can be made available, and to protect the project from legal liability. To fulfill the above goals, original text submitted to Wikipedia is licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the text of all Wikipedia articles under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. See the Users' rights and obligations section below and the above link to the text of the GNU Free Documentation License for specifics.

Essentially, this means that the articles will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to restrictions mentioned below, which serve to ensure that freedom.

Contributors' rights and obligations If you contribute material to Wikipedia, you thereby license it to the public under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). In order to contribute, you therefore must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either

you own the copyright to the material, for instance because you produced it yourself, or you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under GFDL, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under GFDL. In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the GFDL license for the versions you placed here: that material will remain under GFDL forever. In the second case, if you incorporate external GFDL materials, you need to acknowledge the authorship on the history page or talk page and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy. If the original copy required invariant sections, you have to incorporate those into the Wikipedia article; but as with texts used with permission, GFDL texts with invariant sections should be replaced with original or more freely licensed text whenever possible.

Using copyrighted work from others If you use part of a copyrighted work under "fair use", or if you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of our license, you must make a note of that fact (along with names and dates). Place this note on the description page of the image or media file, or in a == References == section, or talk page of the article. It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of Wikipedia's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the GFDL or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use or with limited permission. It is not possible to use text in Wikipedia that is incompatible with the GFDL (small sections of clearly quoted, annotated and attributed text can be considered fair use, however). See Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission for a form letter asking a copyright holder to grant us a license to use their work under terms of the GFDL.

Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt the project. If in doubt, write it yourself.

Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is perfectly legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate it in your own words, and submit it to Wikipedia. (See plagiarism and fair use for discussions of how much reformulation is necessary in a general context.)

Users' rights and obligations If you want to use Wikipedia materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GFDL, which entails the following:

your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL, you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B), and you must provide access to the "transparent copy" of the material (section 4J). (The "transparent copy" of a Wikipedia article is its wiki text.) These two obligations can be fulfilled by providing a conspicuous link back to the home of the article here at wikipedia.org.

Fair use materials Occasionally, Wikipedia articles may include images, sounds, or other similar material from external sources with different copyright terms, and which is used with permission or under "fair use" doctrine. In this case, the material will be identified as from an external source (on the image description page, history page, or talk page as appropriate) and copyright holders of that material retain their rights and you must comply with the separate copyright terms for that material. Wikipedia does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original Wikipedia text (such as including Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover Texts). Wikipedia also uses text under the fair use doctrine. However, what is fair for us to use may not be fair for your intended use of the text. See fair use for more information.

For example, if we include an image under fair use, you must ensure that your use of the article also qualifies for fair use (this might not be the case, for example, if you were using a Wikipedia article for a commercial use that would otherwise be allowed by the GFDL).

If you find a copyright infringement It is not the job of rank-and-file Wikipedians to police every article for possible copyright infringement, but if you suspect one, you should at the very least bring up the issue on that page's talk page. Administrators will examine the situation and take action if needed. The most helpful piece of information you can provide is a URL or other reference to what you believe is the source of the text.

There is a standard text for this notice that explains the situation to the poster in the Wikipedia:Boilerplate text page.

Some cases will be false alarms. For example, if the contributor was in fact the author of the text that is published elsewhere under different terms, that does not affect his right to post it here under the GFDL. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on the web that was copied from Wikipedia. In both of these cases, it is a good idea to make a note in the talk page to discourage such false alarms in the future.

If a page really is an infringement, then an administrator will delete the infringing content and make a note to that effect in the talk page, along with the original source. If the author's permission is obtained later, it can be restored.

In extreme cases of contributors continuing to post copyrighted material after appropriate warnings, such users may be blocked from editing to protect the project.

See also The Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ for questions on copyright. Further discussion...

Wikipedia:Copyright issues Wikipedia and copyright issues m:Avoid Copyright Paranoia