Chalo Chatu:Copyrights violations

From Chalo Chatu, Zambia online encyclopedia

One of the most important aspects of Chalo Chatu is that its text (not media; but that will be discussed shortly) may be freely redistributed, reused and built upon by anyone, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA) and, except where otherwise noted, the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Contributors agree to release their original content under both licenses when they submit it, and material from public domain sources or other compatibly licensed sources may also be used in accordance with the copyright policy, provided correct attribution is given.

However, copying material without the permission of the copyright holder from sources that are not public domain or compatibly licensed (unless it's a brief quotation used in accordance with Chalo Chatu's non-free content policy and guideline ) is likely to be a copyright violation . Even inserting text copied with some changes can be a copyright violation if there is substantial linguistic similarity in creative language or sentence structure; this is known as close paraphrasing, which can also raise concerns about plagiarism. Such a situation should be treated seriously, as copyright violations not only harm Chalo Chatu's redistributability, but also create legal issues.

The situation for images and other media is slightly different, as a wider variety of licenses is accepted. But, in short, media which is not available under a suitable free license and which does not meet the non-free content criteria , should be assumed to be unacceptable.

Dealing with copyright violations

Handling of suspected violations of copyright policy depends on the particulars of a given case. If you suspect a copyright violation but are uncertain if the content is copyrighted or whether the external site is copying from Chalo Chatu, you should at least bring up the issue on that page's discussion page, if it is active. Some cases will be false alarms. For example, text that can be found elsewhere on the Web that was in fact copied from Chalo Chatu in the first place is not a copyright violation – at least not on Chalo Chatu's part. In these cases, it is a good idea to make a note of the situation on the discussion page. Also, if the contributor is the copyright holder of the text, even if it is published elsewhere under different terms, they have the right to post it here under CC BY-SA and GFDL without violating copyright, so long as they provide a suitable release to the world under Chalo Chatu licenses or a free license that is compatible with them. (Text may, however, still be unsuitable for Chalo Chatu for another reason.) A copyright holder cannot both retain non-free copyright elsewhere over their content, and license it for one-time use here with their permission, because Chalo Chatu's licensing scheme requires that its readers and end users be able to reuse the content under the free license notice that is posted at the bottom of every page. If you have strong reason to suspect a violation of copyright policy and some, but not all, of the content of a page appears to be a copyright infringement, then the infringing content should be removed, and a note to that effect should be made on the discussion page, along with the original source, if known. If the copyright holder's permission is later obtained, the text may be restored. If all of the content of a page appears to be a copyright infringement or removing the problem text is not an option because it would render the article unreadable, check the page history; if an older non-infringing version of the page exists, you should revert the page to that version.

If there is no such older version, you may be able to re-write the page from scratch, but failing that, the page will normally need to be deleted.

Addressing contributors

If you can identify the contributor of the content, please notify them of Chalo Chatu's Terms of Use and copyright policies. If a contributor has already been clearly warned of copyright infringement but carried on, they may be reported for administrator attention to the administrators' incidents noticeboard. Contributors who repeatedly post copyrighted material despite appropriate warning may be blocked from editing by any administrator to prevent further problems. Contributors who have extensively violated copyright policy by uploading many copyrighted files or placing copyrighted text into numerous articles may be blocked without warning for the protection of the project, pending satisfactory assurances that infringement will not continue. In extreme cases administrators may impose conditions before unblocking, such as helping with cleanup by disclosing the sources they used. If contributors have been shown to have a history of extensive copyright violation, it may be assumed that all of their major contributions are likely to be copyright violations, and they may be removed indiscriminately.