CISSTwiki:Copyrights
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Contributors' rights and obligations
If you contribute material to ERC CISST Website, you thereby license it to be used and reproduced by CISST and affiliates. In order to contribute, you therefore must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either
- you own the copyright to the material, for instance because you produced it yourself, or
- you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under GFDL, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under GFDL.
Using copyrighted work from others
All works are copyrighted unless they either fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. If you use part of a copyrighted work under "fair use", or if you obtain (buy) special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of our license, you must make a note of that fact (along with names and dates).
Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others.
Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it here. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference.
Image guidelines
Images and photographs, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone owns them unless they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Images 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 a photograph to be used.
U.S. government photographs
Works produced by civilian and military employees of the United States federal government in the scope of their employment are public domain by statute. However, note that, despite popular misconception, the U.S. Federal Government can own copyrights that are assigned to it by others (for example, works created by contractors). Be careful, however: not all images on .mil and .gov websites are public domain. Among other reasons, the site may be using commercial stock photography owned by others. It may be useful to check the privacy and security notice of the website, but only with an email to the webmaster can you be confident that an image is in the public domain. It should also be noted that governments outside the U.S. often do claim copyright over works produced by their employees (for example, Crown copyright in the United Kingdom). Also, most state and local governments in the United States do not place their work into the public domain and do in fact own the copyright to their work. Please be careful to check ownership information before copying.
Linking to copyrighted works
External sites can possibly violate copyright. Linking to copyrighted works is usually not a problem, as long as you have made a reasonable effort to determine that the page in question is not violating someone else's copyright. If it is, please do not link to the page. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States (Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry). Also, linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work is discouraged. If the site in question is making fair use of the material, linking is fine.
Reusers' rights and obligations
If you want to use ERC CISST materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you should be ERC CISST affiliated or ask for written permission.
If you are the owner of CISST-hosted content being used without your permission
If you are the owner of content that is being used on ERC CISST Website without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from the website; Contact us to have it permanently removed, but it may take up to a week for the page to be deleted that way (you may also blank the page but the text will still be in the page history). Either way, we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.