Wikipedia:Meetup/Eugene/ArtAndFeminism 2016/Copyright

The purpose of this brief lecture on copyright is to help you understand and navigate the complexities of copyright as applied to Wikipedia. Copyright itself is a very complex topic that can take a long time to master, and in some cases, there may not be a black and white answer. Also, with the explosion of the internet and digital photography, it is an evolving area of law.

What is copyright
First, what copyright is not. Copyright is part of the four main areas of intellectual property rights law, which includes trademarks (or service marks), patents, trade secrets, and of course copyrights. The average person will often confuse these with each other. So, copyright is not a patent, so it does not cover say prescription drugs or the hoverboards. It also is not a trademark, which are used to identify brands, such as McDonalds, Ford, or ever the Oregon Ducks. Lastly, copyrights are not trade secrets, which the best example of a trade secret is the formula for Coca Cola.

That said, all four of these areas of law can converge. For instance, the logo for a company could both be trademarked and copyrighted. For the purposes of Wikipedia, we only really deal with copyrights, and to a much lesser degree, trademarks. For the copyrights, we are almost always dealing with images. Copyright also applies to written works, such as song lyrics, which is why you usually do not find lyrics to the latest Adele song on Wikipedia, because those lyrics are copyrighted and will be for well over 100 years. For our purposes here, we will only be focused on images.

Wikipedia
As to Wikipedia, it has it's own Copyright Policy, which governs the use of copyrighted material on Wikipedia. While grounded in copyright law, it takes into consideration other factors as well. In a nutshell, basically every image you find on the internet is copyrighted. It may not have a ©, but generally since the moment it was created, it became copyrighted (at least since the Copyright Act of 1976). Being able to enforce one's copyright gets more complex.

What this means is that please, please, please, do not just download some picture from the internet and upload it to Wikipedia. That will almost always be a Copyright Violation (COPYVIO). There are some exceptions, which will be covered later. The better option is to take your own picture, though there are some caveats on that as well.

For images to be used on Wikipedia, they need to be properly licensed. The license is either public domain (as in the copyright has expired, it was never copyrighted, it is a work of the federal government, and a few other options), or licensed that allows others to re-use the work, even commercially. Another option is via a fair use claim. If none of these apply, the item is subject to deletion.

Meet up topic items
Given the topic of this Meetup is Art and Feminism, the most logical images you would be looking to use are pictures of the artists themselves, and/or images of those artists' works. For the most part, if you go take a picture of the artist you will own the copyright and then have no problem using it on Wikipedia. The only potential issue is that people have a right to privacy and there are also personality rights, so best not to sneak into Michael Kors house at night and take a picture for not only copyright issues, but also criminal charges.

This then takes us to the works of art. If you go outside and take a picture of a statue or other art work, you will have a copyright in your photo, but it will be a derivative work of the artist's work, meaning any use of your photo would be copyright infringement without their consent (this assumes a valid copyright on the underlying piece of art). This means you would likely not be able to use such a photograph, and certainly cannot without jumping through some hoops.

Fair Use Defense
There are two ways around the issue of copyrighted works, but they do not work for everything. The first way is via a claim of fair use, which itself has limits. The most important of those is that if you write a biography about an artist and the artists is still alive, you cannot use a copyrighted image of the artist. The thought is, it is improper to use someone else's work when it is technically possible for you to go out and take a picture of the artist yourself.

In regards to images of a work of art, a claim of fair use is usually only allowed to place an image in an article about the work of art. There are some exceptions, but that is the general rule. So, you cannot take a picture of a Jackson Pollock painting and insert it into an article about DUI, even though that is how he died.

OTRS
Another way to get an image onto Wikipedia that you do not own the copyright to is via the OTRS process. This refers to the Open-source Ticket Request System. How this is used is where an editor contacts the copyright holder and obtains permission from them to use their copyrighted work. Obviously, one cannot just take some anonymous user's word that they were given permission, so the OTRS system creates a process to record the evidence of permission. This is usually in the form of an email.

Wikimedia Commons
Known as Commons, this is a sister project that allows images to be used across the different language versions of Wikipedia (and elsewhere). This is the preferred place for you to upload your images to. However, unlike Wikipedia, the images cannot be fair use. Thus, no copyrighted artwork, unless you have permission from the copyright holder. This is also a good resource for images to look for to use in articles created today, or future articles, or even future use outside of Wikipedia (just be mindful of the attribution requirements for most photographs)

Internet sources
As covered above, most images on the internet cannot just be downloaded and added to Wikipedia. However, there are some places on the internet that do allow just that. The key is determining the copyright status. Some people post images to Flickr under a license that allows re-use on Wikipedia. For instance, the Oregon Department of Transportation and some other state agencies do this. The federal government also posts many images to the internet, and any work by them is not copyrighted (the key is it has to be by them, and some images they host were taken by other people). To the left are some good sources for such free images.

Violations
If you upload anything that does in fact violate a copyright, it is what we call a COPYVIO. Not only are you violating copyright law and could potentially face an issue (very unlikely), but so too could Wikipedia. However, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) there is what we call a safe harbor provision for websites like Wikipedia that include user generated content. This provision protects Wikipedia from legal issues as long as they have a process to deal with any such violations, which is why COPYVIOs are routinely deleted. This is how YouTube largely escapes legal issues with all of the copyrighted material all over their sight.

Is it Still Copyrighted?
The last item to cover is that copyrights are currently not indefinite. The amount of protection has steadily grown from the 1790 Copyright Act of only 28 years to technically an indefinite amount given the time is now tied to the lifetime of the author. Cornell University's law school has maintained a handy Public Domain Chart that can assist, but note the extensive footnotes and exceptions. The general rule though is that anything published before 1923 is in the public domain and can be used freely. Please also note this really only cover US copyright laws, and images may be subject to a different jurisdiction.

Of course, you can always ask for help with any of this. Whether you need to know if something is still copyrighted, how to upload an image, how to use it in Wikipedia, just ask someone use the tag on your user talk page. And the tools along the left of your browser can be very useful.

Lastly, good luck, and do not be afraid to try something. As long as you are not trying to do something bad (say inserting dick pics everywhere), people are not going to be mad and will try to help you fix the problem.