Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-2240864-20180814202900

Hello, everyone, ClericofMadness here. I have a very important announcement to make regarding copyright and Creative Commons licensing, but first a little explanation and an apology.

For a while now, we have had a policy of flexible Creative Commons licensing. I was informed recently that we should not continue with such a policy, and that in fact such a policy would have never have had any real, legal effect under Fandom’s standard licensing, which is CC-BY-SA.

I was erroneously informed that it was possible for us to utilize the many Creative Commons licenses such as CC-BY-NC and others many, many years ago by a user that was more familiar with the workings of then-Wikia’s systems and licensing. Apparently, though, as Fandom Staff have duly informed me, this was never the case.

I would therefore like to take this time to apologize for my mistake. I am sorry. This is the fault of no one but my own that these policies were “implemented” with the intentions of protecting authors’ rights. Intentions aside, I must now take action to correct the mistake I have made.

This brings me to the point of this posting: the announcement and the plan. From this moment on, all stories on this wiki are to be considered under a CC-BY-SA license. There is no option to host stories under non-compliant licenses. Anything you write or upload to this wiki must be under a CC-BY-SA license.

It is therefore with this understanding that from this moment on, stories or postings from Reddit are no longer allowed. Any current Reddit stories will be deleted and there will be a new posting policy added to the site rules that will clearly state this. Reddit uses an incompatible license, a copyright and not Creative Commons. As such, the content that has been posted from there will be removed in order to bring us into compliance.

If you have posted a story on this site and you do not wish to have your story fall under a CC-BY-SA license, please add the category CCD and it will be deleted by an admin. At the end of this month (August), all remaining stories that are posted that have a licensing text that is not CC-BY-SA will be deleted as a courtesy to the authors. However, please do not take this as an invitation to do nothing; your desires as the rights holder will not be able to be enforced if you allow your works to remain.

All of this having been said, however, I need to remind the YouTube narrators in the audience that if while you will not need to expressly ask for permission in order to read the stories on this website; it is appreciated greatly by almost every author.

However, what is not optional is attribution. You must credit the author and the source when using material from this wiki. The attribution should include a link to the page with the full story title intact, a link to the author’s user page, and a link to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license page with a note that the work presented is derivative. Overall, the attribution should include the title, author, source, and license. The minimum you must include in an attribution is a link to the story, the author’s username, and a link to the CC-BY-SA license with a note that the work is derivative.

If you do not correctly include all of those, you are committing copyright violation and can be subject to a copyright strike on your channel by the author. All new narration videos must follow this proper attribution guideline from this point forward. For questions about existing videos, please use Special:Contact to talk to staff about the attribution process for older videos. I do not know what version of the license was previously used nor if/when it was changed. This is beyond my knowledge.

This attribution policy also extends to people wishing to use the content on this wiki on articles, advertisements, etc. Proper attribution must be given regardless of where the content is being used. As an additional note, not that it has previously come into play before, if you intend to redistribute a work from this wiki, you will need to release your derivative content under a CC-BY-SA license. You cannot claim copyright, nor can you release it under CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-ND, etc.

Thank you for your attention in this matter, and again, I am sorry for my mistake in this issue. If you have questions, comments, concerns, or any issues relating to this topic, please leave a message on my talk page or comment on this thread.

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