User talk:L8nda

Welcome to Wikipedia!
Dear L8nda: Welcome to Wikipedia, a free and open-content encyclopedia. I hope you enjoy contributing. To help get you settled in, I thought you might find the following pages useful:


 * Five Pillars of Wikipedia
 * Community Portal
 * Frequently Asked Questions
 * How to edit a page
 * How to revert to a previous version of a page
 * Tutorial
 * Copyrights
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If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type   on your user page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions.

Wikipedians try to follow a strict policy of never biting new users. If you are unsure of how to do something, you are welcome to ask a more experienced user such as an administrator. One last bit of advice: please sign any discussion comment with four tildes (~&#126;). The software will automatically convert this into your signature which can be altered in the "Preferences" tab at the top of the screen. I hope I have not overwhelmed you with information. If you need any help just let me know. Once again welcome to Wikipedia, and don't forget to tell us about yourself and be BOLD! Baseball Baby  00:54, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

John Landis copyvio problem
Hi - thanks for the message, and welcome to Wikipedia!

I've heard of situations like the one you describe, and unfortunately there's not much that can be done. You may have created it, but when it was uploaded or posted to IMDB you assigned copyright to IMDB (and Amazon.com, its owner). IMDB now owns the copyright to the words you wrote and makes money from that content. Since Wikipedia lives and breathes on free content, that means Wikipedia can't use that bio _unless_ IMDB releases it to Wikipedia for use in an article about John Landis. You could always ask, but in the real world that's not going to happen.

You can summarize or paraphrase or condense or expand the bio at IMDB, but it can't be cut/pasted into Wikipedia because IMDB could claim Wikipedia is infringing its copyright of the text. Sorry – I wish I could help, but that's the way of the copyrighted world.

Let me know if you have more questions or need help, and I'll do my best. Again, welcome! Baseball Baby  00:54, 16 September 2006 (UTC)