Media Copyright and Permissible Sources

Climate Lab requires documentation for all media uploaded and/or inserted into wiki pages to credit authors, deter copyright infridgement, and ultimately to make the wiki pages more useful to editors and visitors. Documentation for media should provide a means to verify the source of the content and that the media is, in fact, properly licensed or otherwise permissible to be posted on the Climate Lab wiki.

Media requirements

To this end, before a media is uploaded, make sure at least one of the following requirements is met:

You own the rights to the media (usually meaning that you created the image yourself.)
You can prove the copyright holder has licensed the image under an acceptable free license. (For example, a Creative Commons license)
You can prove that the image is in the public domain – that is, all copyright free material.
You believe, and are able to state, a fair use rationale for the specific use of the image that you intend to use.

Required documentation

Image documentation is required and included with all images or graphics inserted into a wiki article. The documentation required includes:

Caption: identifies the image and/or providing context to associate it with the article.
Source: should list the copyright holder and/or the URL from where image came.
Author: is the image creator, which can be the same as the source.
Permission: identifies what person, law or doctrine allows the image to be used. For example, "Fair Use," "public domain," "Creative Common Share Alike 3.0," the name of the person who gave you permission to use the image, etc

Determining usability

There are a variety of avenues that allow the integration of media into the Climate Lab wiki, in some cases even if it is copyrighted, such as under Fair Use. If your media was created by the editor, available in the public domain, published under a compatible Creative Commons license, or fits the requirements to allow it to be used under the Fair Use doctrine, you should be able to use it on the Climate Lab wiki.

Self created

If an editor uses content that he or she has produced then, it falls into the public domain category and is therefore completely usable. For example, if you take a picture of a compact fluorescent lightbulb and post it to the wiki, that picture will not infringe upon any copyright law.

Creative Commons

All media attributed with a creative commons tag is usable. Creative Commons is an organization that marks creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof. These pictures are usually denoted with a “cc” logo. Creative commons offers six types of licenses.

Attribution: This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit the author for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.
Attribution Share Alike: This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon an authors work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.
Attribution No Derivatives: This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the author.
Attribution Non-Commercial: This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon an authors work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge the author and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike: This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon an authors work non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute an authors work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on the authors work. All new work will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives: This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

GNU Free Documentation License

Written by the Free Software Foundation. People are required to attribute the work to you, and if they make changes or incorporate your work in their work, they are required to share their changes or work under the same license.

Material licensed under the current version of the license can be used for any purpose, as long as the use meets certain conditions:

All previous authors of the work must be attributed.

All changes to the work must be logged.

The full text of the license, unmodified invariant sections as defined by the author if any, and any other added warranty disclaimers (such as a general disclaimer alerting readers that the document may not be accurate for example) and copyright notices from previous versions must be maintained.

Public domain

The public domain is a range of abstract materials—commonly referred to as intellectual property—which are not owned or controlled by anyone. A creative work is said to be in the public domain if there are no laws, which restrict its use, by the public at large.

Federal documents and publications are not copyrighted, and therefore are considered to be in the Public Domain. Consequently, if you obtain a government document from the net, such as a law, statute, agency circular, federal report, or any other document published or generated by the federal government, you are free to copy or distribute the document.

Fair use

Posting under fair use: according to the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, parody, news reporting, and scholarly reports.

For your media to be protected under fair use, please be sure to use less than five images or less then 10% of a particular photographer/artists work. The purpose of the media should be for non-slanderous commentary, criticism, parody, or news reporting.

Finding permissible media

The following are some suggestions as to where you can find usable media to post on the ClimateLab Wiki:

Google Advanced Image Search: This search engine gives the user an option to filter search results by license.
Yahoo Creative Commons: Yahoo allows you to search the entire web based on the licenses attached to the content.
Wikimedia Commons: is the central clearing area for the Wikimedia projects creative commons licensed files.
Flickr Creative Commons: users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license. Flickr.com offers a search engine for all creative commons photos; it also offers plenty of information to appropriately accredit the source.
TED.com: Anyone is free to download the videos from TED.com; share them with friends; republish or embed them on their website or blog. But this use must be made within the terms of the Creative Commons license "Attribution Non Commercial No Derivative."
istockphoto.com - an online, royalty free, international microstock photography provider operating with the micropayment business model. Images cost between 1 and 20 credits, depending on size.