User talk:DarkGhostLegend

January 2010
Your addition to The Crazies (2010 film) has been removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material to Wikipedia without permission from the copyright holder. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material; such additions will be deleted. You may use external websites as a source of information, but not as a source of article content such as sentences or images. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. Moonriddengirl (talk) 17:58, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

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I am sorry, I did not know this, It was a honest mistake which i did not mean to make, Please show me the exact website when the text came from, Which should be word for word if what you say is correct, And i will accept i was wrong to do it, Either way i apologize and it will not happen again.
 * Word for word copying is not the extent of copyright infringement under the US law that governs Wikipedia. Since copyright covers the creative expression of ideas, not facts, we can paraphrase external sources (though we should still acknowledge them to avoid plagiarism and meet verifiability policies). But we have to be careful when paraphrasing that we do not too closely follow the original in structure and language. The US government utilizes a "substantial similarity" test intended to determine if infringement exists. Melville Nimmer produced subcategories of "substantial similarity" for which the court search. In the first, they look for "fragmented literal similarity", checking for phrases and passages copied from the original text. Unless such phrases are defensible as fair use, their presence is a strong indicator of infringement. (Note that on Wikipedia, such phrases must always conform to our non-free content guideline.) This is a definition of copyright with which most contributors are familiar.


 * But in the second, courts look for "comprehensive non-literal similarity." Even if there is no verbatim duplication of the copyrighted original, infringement can be found if the new version follows so closely on the structure of the original that copying is clear. As the US Court of Appeals noted in discussing Artica v. Palmer, et al. (970 F.2d 106, 1992): "A plaintiff succeeds under this doctrine when it shows that the pattern or sequence of the two works is similar." Wikipedia's contributors are cautioned here against utilizing great detail in summarizing or analyzing, to avoid creating a derivative work, as only the original copyright holder has the legal right to license derivative works.


 * This can be a challenge in practice, but we do need to be careful to comply, since word-for-word duplication is not the limit of copyright infringement. Basically, what this means is that you can't read an article in The Fabulous Encyclopedia of Everything and reproduce it here, not even if you tweak the language a bit so that there is no "literal similarity." A close paraphrase of another source may be a derivative work, which is actionable unless it meets the fair use doctrine. If substantial similarity exists, you could be in trouble. Wikipedia could potentially be in trouble along with you. The best way to avoid this is to not only substantially restructure the article, but also to incorporate additional sources. If you're drawing on multiple sources, you're less likely to be taking too much from one.


 * To read more about summary, I heartily recommend the following:
 * Close paraphrasing
 * FCDW/Plagiarism
 * Tweedledum and Tweedledee: Plagiarism and Copyright.
 * This guide from Purdue University


 * As for the exact source, you will probably find it in one of the 8,890 hits (give or take) for a text string at google:.


 * No apology is needed. Please, simply be sure to follow Wikipedia's copyright policy and Terms of Use in future. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:43, 4 January 2010 (UTC)