VCSEwiki:Ethical code of conduct

Texts in this Wiki space (but not media - see below) 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 the GNU Free documentation licence (GFDL). 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, material copied from sources that are not public domain or compatibly licensed without the permission of the copyright holder is likely to be a copyright violation. Such a situation should be taken seriously, as copyright violations are not acceptable in the academic environment.

Copyright, violations and plagiarism

Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, articles in a Wiki space which cite their sources will link to copyrighted material. It is not necessary to obtain the permission of a copyright holder before linking to copyrighted material, just as an author of a book does not need permission to cite someone else's work in their bibliography. For more:

• When to cite sources
• Avoid plagiarism - see OWL materials
• A brief overview of: The Correct Use of Borrowed Information {online}. Rock Hill, South Carolina, USA : Winthrop University, 2005-2007 {2007-12-27}. Online <http://faculty.winthrop.edu/nearym/correct_use_of_borrowed_info.htm>.
• Cite your sources correctly - a reference list should be developed while you are reading and using your resources for writing. You can read more at citation rules
• Here is an overview of (mainly American) copyright and examples of country specific regulations.
• Some other types of copyright

If a page contains material which infringes copyright, that material – and the whole page, if there is no other material present – is not acceptable. See, for example, Wikipedia:Copyright violations for more information.

Guidelines for images and other media files

The situation for images and other media is slightly different, as a wider variety of licenses is accepted. But, in short, media which are not available under a suitable free license and which do not meet the non-free content criteria, should be assumed to be unacceptable. See Wikipedia:Image use policy and Wikipedia:Non-free content for details of this.

Images, photographs, video and sound files, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone holds the copyright unless they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Images, video and sound files on the internet need to be licensed directly from the copyright holder or someone able to license on their behalf. In some cases, fair use guidelines may allow them to be used irrespective of any copyright claims; see Wikipedia:Non-free content for more.

Image description pages must be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images, as described at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags. Untagged or incorrectly-tagged images will be deleted.

Sources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COPYLINK#Linking_to_copyrighted_works
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_violations
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems#Instructions
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content