AGHSReunions:Agreements/License Agreement

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This page explains the standard license terms for original materials published on the various AGHS Reunions Web sites, unless a more specific license is indicated. The "various AGHS Reunions Web sites" include the Portal Page, Announcement Blog, Wiki, Gallery, Community, Plaza, and other areas hosted under the "AGHSReunions.com" domain name. Collectively, these sites will be referred to as "AGHSr Sites".

Content that is not your own work may, in some situations, be submitted and included in the AGHSr Sites, and this page explains the additional limitations and requirements of such material. In all cases where outside material is submitted, it must be licensed for redistribution under a compatible license. This does, however, create an extra burden in properly identifying, documenting, and attributing the outside work and meeting the requirements of the license. It also reduces the flexibility others have in reusing our material for their own needs. Therefore, it is always preferable to submit only original work to which you hold the copyright so that it can be released under our standard license terms.

Contents

Standard license

Cc by sa 88x31.png

Unless otherwise noted, all original content of the AGHSr Sites, except for media uploaded to our Gallery (see below), is automatically multi-licensed under the following licenses. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of any or all of the following licenses. You are free to choose whichever license(s) is/are most appropriate for your needs.

  1. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License (cc-by-3.0). In a nutshell, this license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon our work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit us.
  2. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License (cc-by-sa-3.0). This is essentially the same as the cc-by-3.0 license, except that any new creations must be licensed under identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on ours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.
  3. GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), Version 1.2 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. This is the same license used to license articles from the English Wikipedia and many other wikis. This permits entire articles or portions thereof to be cross-posted between wikis as long as the terms of the GFDL are followed.
  4. Free Art License 1.3 (FAL 1.3)
  5. Common Documentation License (CDL) Version 1.0 published by Apple Computer, Inc.
  6. Artistic License 2.0 published by The Perl Foundation.
  • Note: Nothing in the above licenses affects your rights to use any information which may be separately licensed to you by us for other uses and possibly subject to other conditions.

The act of submitting new, original material to the AGHSr Sites, except for media uploaded to our Gallery (see below), automatically grants the above licenses to the submitted material. It is your responsibility to accurately identify material obtained from other sources (i.e., you did not create it yourself) and the license(s) that apply to the material. A "summary" notation and/or bibliographic reference should always be added to content from other sources at the same time the content is added to the AGHSr Sites; depending on the terms of the license under which the outside content is licensed, additional details and attribution may be required.

The account holder shall be responsible for all submissions made under his or her account and agrees (1) to safeguard authentication details (i.e., username and password) to avoid unauthorized use of the account; (2) to not submit any materials to which the account holder does not hold the copyright and for which an acceptable free license is not available; (3) to refrain from uploading materials likely to be considered by a reasonable person as being objectionable, indecent, pornographic, or libelous, or that contain gratuitous nudity or violence, irresponsible behavior, or depictions of criminal acts; and (4) to indemnify and hold-harmless Will Murray, the AGHSr Sites, and the users and administrators of the AGHSr Sites from any and all claims resulting from materials submitted to the AGHSr Sites under his or her account.

Gallery content

The AGHSr Sites Gallery is a collection of multimedia materials submitted by members and intended to be shared with and enjoyed by their friends and classmates. The collected content of the Gallery is not licensed under any permissive license and may not be copied, redistributed, mixed, tweaked, or modified without the explicit permission of the copyright holder (i.e., the person uploading the media).

Individuals are encouraged to license their materials under one or more of the following licenses, but are under no obligation to do so:

Anyone granting such a license should be aware that such a license is irrevocable (you can't change your mind later), and doing so allows your content to be used anywhere, without any compensation (you won't get paid for it), and for practically any purpose (content creators in many countries, with the notable exception of the U.S., have certain "moral rights" that may provide some redress if a derivative work represents a "derogatory treatment" of your original work).

The act of uploading material to the AGHSr Sites Gallery implies a non-exclusive, irrevocable grant of license to Will Murray and the AGHSr Sites, along with any assigns and/or heirs, to use the material, without charge or other compensation, and without limitation on time or method of presentation. The uploader further agrees that the material may be modified or edited by the site administrators to meet community standards, changes or limitations in technology, or other necessary reasons; additionally, the content may be removed with or without cause at any time. The account holder shall be responsible for all uploads made under his or her account and agrees (1) to safeguard authentication details (i.e., username and password) to avoid unauthorized use of the account; (2) to not upload any materials to which the account holder does not hold the copyright; (3) to refrain from uploading materials likely to be considered by a reasonable person as being objectionable, indecent, pornographic, or libelous, or that contain gratuitous nudity or violence, irresponsible behavior, or depictions of criminal acts; and (4) to indemnify and hold-harmless Will Murray, the AGHSr Sites, and the users and administrators of the AGHSr Sites from any and all claims resulting from materials uploaded to the AGHSr Sites' Gallery under his or her account.

Non-commercial use

The AGHSr Sites are noncommercial and are believed to qualify to freely use any works licensed "for non-commercial use" based on the following points:

  1. The site is owned by an individual (Will Murray), not an organization.
  2. There is no charge to join as a member.
  3. At present, the AGHSr Sites do not sell any products or services.
  4. Donations are accepted to help offset the cost of domain, hosting, and other Internet service charges. Likewise, small ads are placed on the site with no intention of generating a profit, but rather to help offset expenses.
  5. If any received donations, ad revenue, or future sales of products or services exceed our expenses, they will be put back into the site to improve the site for everyone or will be donated to a 501(c)(3) qualified charitable, educational, or scientific non-profit charity.

"Non-commercial use" is, presumably, use that is not commercial use. "Commercial use" is a commonly used term that seems to have no precise definition, or rather, it has several definitions with no single definition taking precedence over the others. The most strict interpretations indicate that any use other than by an individual, even use by a non-profit or charitable organization regardless of whether the use brings any financial return, or by anyone, even an individual, if there is any income derived from the activity regardless of any profit or loss, is commercial use. The most generous interpretations indicate that any use is permitted as long as you don't make a profit directly from the original creator's work (i.e., selling something the creator gave away freely but could have sold instead).

Creative Commons defines "NonCommercial" use to mean, "you may not use the work in a manner primarily directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation." This still leaves some uncertainty, but seems to favor a middle ground, slightly leaning toward the more generous interpretation of "commercial use" (i.e., anyone can use it anywhere as long as they don't charge others for the work and do not make a profit from it).

Submitting outside material

You can submit materials covered under a variety of licenses, as long as at least one of them meets the criteria for free licenses below. For example, information under a "no-derivatives" license is permitted only if it is at the same time also released under a free license that allows derivatives to be made. This allows us to create derivative work and release that work under our standard license.

While we believe our site to be "non-commercial" (see above), we do not limit others to non-commercial use of our materials. Therefore, it is preferable to not have that limitation be placed on materials submitted to our site. It also helps avoid the whole issue of whether or not our non-commercial site might be viewed as a commercial site by those with a very conservative view.

Our site's policy is to clearly identify all information that is not covered exclusively by our standard license terms. Further, any such non-standard licensed information is to remain separate from standard licensed work. Any work that is not covered covered exclusively by our standard license terms must be identified clearly.

Restrictions on license provisions

All material not covered covered exclusively by our standard license terms must be licensed under a free license that allows anyone to use the material for any purpose.

In particular, the license must meet the following conditions
  • Republication and distribution must be allowed.
  • Publication of derivative work must be allowed (adding it to our site is usually considered a derivation since it is no longer in its original form).
The license should meet the following condition
  • Commercial use of the work should be allowed since we do not restrict commercial use of our original material and intermingling incompatible licensed material makes things very confusing.
In some cases we may accept licenses with the following conditions
  • Acknowledgment of all authors/contributors of a work (generally easy to do with multimedia and other documents, but nearly impossible for text unless a standard bibliographical citation suffices)
  • Publication of derivative work under the same license (it depends on the other conditions of the license)
  • Use under fair use restrictions as defined under U.S. copyright law (it depends on several factors)
The following restrictions should not apply to the material
  • Noncommercial/educational use only (see above)
The following restrictions must not apply to the material
  • Prohibition of use by the AGHSr Sites.
  • Notification of the creator required, rather than requested, for all or for some uses (we simply do not have the time or resources to notify content creators).

Compatible licenses

The following well-known licenses are preferred for materials submitted to the AGHSr Sites

† This is one of our standard license options and is fully compatible with the goals of the AGHSr Sites.

Possibly compatible licenses

No derivatives

These licenses may by compatible under certain circumstances. If the license is generally compatible but includes a "no derivatives" clause, you will find the license here. No derivatives means that the work must be redistributed intact and unaltered. A PDF document or graphic placed on this site in its original form is perfectly fine. Copying text from a PDF document and using it in an article, and also converting a JPEG image into an SVG image, are not permissible. Be sure to carefully consider the license limitations before using the material to avoid problems.

Share alike

Another potential difficulty is with licenses containing "share alike" clauses. Share alike means that the material, and any derivative works, must be licensed in the same manner as the original material. This creates an administrative burden for keeping track of how the information is licensed. It also prevents cleanly combining dissimilarly licensed material together (i.e., combining information from two differently licensed sources is practically impossible). For this reason, share-alike licensed material must always be clearly identified.

† This is one of our standard license options. While the license is compatible with our site, it limits the ability of the information from being reused elsewhere under any of our standard license options. For example, it is perfectly acceptable to copy information from the English Wikipedia (GFDL) to the AGHSr Sites, but someone wishing to reuse that same information under a Creative Commons license (e.g., cc-by) would not be permitted to do so under the terms of the GFDL, and vice-versa. That is why we license all original material under multiple licenses.

Limited use

Some licenses permit one type of use but restrict others. So, depending on how the material is used, the following licenses may be compatible. It is extremely important that the license restriction be clearly noted since it may not be appropriate for others to reuse the material.

Date restrictions

Some licenses restrict usage until a certain amount of time has passed. Until then, the material is incompatible, but after that date, it may become compatible (unless the protection is extended). Such licenses include:

  • Any material copyrighted in the United States; Depending on when it was created and the copyright date, different periods may apply
  • Creative Commons Founder's Copyright — A 14-year initial term that may be renewed once for an additional fourteen years.

Incompatible licenses

Unless the material is multi-licensed with a compatible license (see above), the following licenses are incompatible with our site's licensing and usage model. This is far from a comprehensive list, but rather a sample of licenses commonly found in use at sites with content that might be useful here but is unusable due to restrictive license rights.

Public domain materials

We allow all works that are not applicable to copyright (i.e. in the public domain). However, it is unclear how material is to be handled that is in the public domain in the United States, but not in others. Since we are U.S.-based and our Web site is in the U.S., it is not a problem for us. If you choose to reuse something in the "public domain", but you are outside of the U.S., your usage rights may be different.

All such work should be identified with a "summary note" or other bibliographic notation at the same time the work is submitted indicating that the material is in the public domain and provide justification for that determination (i.e., the date of the original copyright that expired, the publisher was an agency of the United States government, etc.).

Note that the AGHSr Sites standard license terms will then apply to the public domain material submitted to our site; however, that does not take the material out of the public domain.

Examples of commonly disallowed items

Generally the following are not allowed without specific authorization from the copyright holder, except as permitted under "fair use" principles:

  • Copyrighted symbols, logos, etc.
  • Scans or reproductive photographs of copyrighted artwork, especially book covers, album/CD covers, etc.
  • Screenshots, boxes, and other images of software that is itself not under a free license; images of software under the GPL or a similar free software license are generally considered to be acceptable
  • TV screenshots (programs and commercials)
  • Models, masks, toys, and other objects which represent a copyrighted work, such as a cartoon or movie character (rather than just a particular actor, regardless of a specific role)

See also

License attribution

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