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Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons licences & Intellectual Property rights

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What is Wikimedia Commons?
What is a Creative Commons license
Why CC license
Types of Creative Commons licenses
Using Creative Commons licenses
How to upload media files
How to add an additional category to your upload
How to add a file to the body of the article
How to add an image to infobox
Fair use of film posters on English Wikipedia
Intellectual property rights

CONTENTS

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What is Wikimedia Commons?

Wikimedia Commons is the media repository of free-use

images, sounds, other media, and media type files for Wikipedia and its sister projects. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.The media files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons are released under a Creative Commons license during the upload process.

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What are Creative Commons Licenses?

Creative Commons (CC) Licenses are public licenses used to indicate what other people are allowed to do with your work.

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Why CC licenses?

Every creative work is automatically protected by copyright, which means that others will need to ask permission from the author as the copyright owner.
CC licenses provide a simple, standardised way to grant copyright permissions to a creative work.
CC licences empowers creators to give implicit permission to everyone to use, share, and remix their work without needing to ask in each instance.
CC licenses can be multi- layered, allowing more or less freedom

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Types of Creative Commons licenses

CC ZeRo

No attribution required. Work can be shared, recreated, copied, remixed etc including for commercial purposes.

CC BY

Work can be adapted in whatever way however, attribution must be given to original author.

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Types of Creative Commons licenses

Work can be adapted but must be attributed and shared using the same CC-BY-SA

Work can be adapted, attributed but must not be sold or used for commercial purposes

CC BY SA

CC BY NC

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Types of Creative Commons licenses

Work can be used with attribution, can be adapted but must not be sold and also must be shared using the same CC-BY-NC-SA

Work can be used with attribution

but must not be adapted in any way

CC BY NC SA

CC BY ND

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Types of Creative Commons licenses

Work can be used with attribution but cannot be used commercially, sold nor adapted in any way

CC BY NC ND

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Key Concepts

The main themes of CC Licences are:

ORiginAl AuthoR

You cannot license what you did not create

ADAptAtion incluDeS

copying distribution, editing,

remixing, and building upon an existing work or its related concepts

lAw

Work licensed under a Creative Commons license is governed by applicable copyright law.

coveRAge

Creative Commons licenses can be applied to all copyrightable works including: books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, and websites.

DeRivAtive WoRk

means a work based upon the Work or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization etc

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CrEaTive COmMons platFoRMs

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Using Creative Commons licenses

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How to upload media files to WIkimedia Commons
How to add an additional category to your upload
How to add a file to the body of the article
How to add an image to infobox

Let’s get hands-on!!!

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Fair use of film posters/images on English Wikipedia

If the image you wish to upload is not under a free license, but meets all of Wikipedia's fair use criteria, then you are permitted to upload it directly into the English Wikipedia with a fair use rationale. Keep in mind that it is not permitted to upload fair use images into Wikimedia Commons, but it is permitted to do so into English Wikipedia. In addition to fair use images, it is possible to upload any image directly to Wikipedia; though, doing so lacks some advantages of Commons

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Intellectual property rights

Intellectual property (IP) describes a form of property which is the intangible output of the human creative mind.

Scope includes:

●Copyright - the exclusive and assignable legal right, given to the creator for a fixed time, to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material.

●Patent right - an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem.

●Trademark - a symbol, word, or words legally registered or established by use as representing a company or product.

●Trade secret - a secret device or technique used by a company in manufacturing its products.

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Intellectual property rights

The threshold of originality is used in copyright law to assess whether or not a particular work, or a portion of it, can be copyrighted. It is used to distinguish works that are sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection from those that are not.

E ts-Hokin v Skyy Spirits Inc.:

Photo is eligible for copyright protection,

but not the bottle

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Freedom of panorama

In some countries, there is a special exception to the copyright law which allows making photo or video footage of public paintings, sculpture, architecture, text, and other creative works within 70 years while the creator is alive, under certain circumstances without the permission of the creator. We call that exception Freedom of panorama (FoP).

Unfortunately there is no applicable FOP exception in some African countries.

In fact, effective 17th March 2023, there is no more Freedom of panorama in Nigeria. This means that you can only make photo or video footage of public paintings, sculpture, architecture, text, and other creative works 70 years after the death of the creator, unless with the creator’s permission.

Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Mauritania, Mozambique (for photos executed in the Portuguese territory of Mozambique before 25 June 1975), Tunisia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe have FoP.

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Freedom of panorama(FoP)

Benin Republic, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sao Tome Principe, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Togo, Zambia.

Works that are on permanent public display in the above-listed countries may not be free (no applicable freedom of panorama exception in these countries).

Therefore, you may not take photograph of copyrighted works on public display without a written permission from the creator of those works or a clear evidence that the copyright has expired.

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De minimis

De minimis is a concept in copyright used to describe the minimal or trivial use of copyrighted works in such a way that permission or consent of the copyright holders is not required.

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De minimis

This photograph is acceptable as the copyrighted images appearing on the screens are de minimis.

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De minimis

This photograph is not a copyright violation since its focus is not the Louvre pyramid but the entire plaza.

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Freedom of panorama vs De minimis

In countries where there is no applicable freedom of panorama, if the copyrighted object (building, sculpture, artwork etc) is incidentally captured, the principle of De minimis may apply and as such, the image or footage is not infringing on any copyright.

Burj Khalifa��(UAE allows the freedom of

panoramas only when used in

broadcast programs.)

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Non-Copyright Restrictions

This logo of Chicago Union Station is not considered a "work of authorship" because it only consists of text in a simple typeface, so it is not an object of copyright in respect to US law. However, this logo is still protected by trademark laws.

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Non-Copyright Restrictions: Personality Rights

Every person has a right to publicity, the right to control the commercial use of their identity, name, image etc.

Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable, but a subject of an image still reserves the right to request that their image be deleted from Commons and any other website if they believe that the use of such image violates their personality rights (even though the image is protected by copyright).

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RefeRenceS

The Creative Commons poster on this page has been copied from eCampusOntario and is used under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This chapter is adapted from the Faculty OER Toolkit by BCcampus is used under a CC-BY 4.0 International license. Download this book for free at http://open.bccampus.ca

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/legalcode

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THANK YOU!