Probably worth having someone with legal training check that this is entirely legit, but +1 anyways.
Licensing Guide / Discussion
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(account deleted)Why do I get the feeling that this is in response to that recent nightmare video posted earlier?
I think it's more related to the recent Minecraft mod than the video.
But really we've needed this for a long time. That was just the latest in a long string of CC violations we felt the need to address. No one thing was to blame.
What about the fact that for a lot of the photos on which SCPs are based, we don't own them and don't have the license and can't release them under Creative Commons?
That's sorta covered, just not explicitly stated….
Any derivative works (stuff based on the SCP Foundation) must attribute back to the original source, the SCP Foundation wiki.
This also means that anyone making stuff derived from your work has to attribute you as one of the creators.
If it's a picture someone used for their article instead of a picture they took themselves(which is probably the case in 90% or more of articles), then it is not "their work". Thus someone using that imagery does not require attribution to the SCP wiki, and them using it is violation of the image owner's copyright.
HOWEVER, if they label that imagery with the appropriate object designation and either write about or otherwise portray its properties in a way that is obviously based on the article that uses that image, then attribution becomes required because of that writing and source material.
So, is there a problem with us using images we don't have copyright over?
Technically, legally, yes. Those images are owned by their creators and yes we are violating copyright by using them. Unfortunate truth, we can't just pretend that's not the case…..it happens all the time across the internet, but that doesn't make it "ok".
But worth noting is that it's kind of a good thing that people don't obtain the permission of the original image creators to release their images under Creative Commons, as then they would lose what legal control they would have over that image as long as people properly followed the CC license. If an original image creator contacts us and asks us to remove their image from the site, we do so without hesitation, and would happily help them go after anyone who refused to do likewise. If they released under CC, then even though we would still remove it ourselves there wouldn't be much they could do about violators elsewhere.
So to sum up, as far as images go, unless you took the image yourself and are releasing it under CC, they remain protected and are NOT covered by CC, and anyone who uses them is doing so at their own risk. But the best course for image creators who are ok with us using their images is to simply not take legal action against us for using their material, rather than explicitly giving permission for it to be used. And no, attribution cannot be demanded of anyone who uses an image from an article when it wasn't taken by the author.
I'd been wondering this myself. Thanks for the clarification!
Rhett: You really need to put up a section on merchandise.
This is it, really. This covers everything people would need to know for merchandise as well. At least the part of it that would have anything to do with us. If they follow the rules of CC, then whether or not they sell what they make is irrelevant, and we detail the rules of CC here well enough that people could go off of this guide alone. The only other thing there would be to say is "if you decide to sell merchandise based off of SCP materials then we STRONGLY encourage you to make sure that the original authors of the material you reference are ok with you doing so, so that we don't end up with a bunch of angry authors who decide to delete their stuff and leave."
If you mean merchandise as in how it would work on the official site if we ever chose to have a store(which we may or may not, we are completely undecided on that), we'll write that bridge when we come to it.
We really needed this kind of article. too.
This article is translated into Korean. #
Thank you very much.
Awesome that you translated it :) I just have one thing to tell you….."Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200" is a reference to the american board game Monopoly, in which if you pass the space "Go" you get $200 of game money added to your money supply. Thus your footnote about the minimum cost is actually not accurate.
I have a question,
What actions would you take if someone infringes the license?
Nobody answer it…
Do you mind if I ask again?
What actions would you take if someone infringes the license?
We send in our elite legal team to sue the pants off you.
Admin, SCP Wiki
In Korea, there is a site which has no attribution, and no wiki link.
http://blog.naver.com/scp_korea
You may have seen this guy when he sent you a PM about Korean wiki.
This guy is calling himself SCP Foundation, and his blog title means "SCP Foundation Korean Breach"
Other person had been warning these problem to this blogger for few months, but he ignored every message we sent.
What should I do about this guy.
Hmm, they've got the CC license on their site but they need attribution, either to you guys or to us to show who they got the material from.
We would send a DMCA notice to their host to compel them to either take the stuff down or properly attribute that but DMCA is a US law. I believe Korea has its own equivalent law that would allow you to do the same. If they are ignoring you, contact their webhost about it. I'd recommend looking up the proper way to send the notice though, while I send out these notices for stuff on this side finding the right text for a Korean version is beyond my abilities.
They would take it, but the problem is that this host site actually does not seem to care much about this License problem.
To add, blogger have to attribute to their users, not to Korean wiki. Their users doesn't know about this License, and agreed to the Blogger, without that knowledge.
Have you guys already actually contacted the host? As I understand it if they fail to respond they put themselves at risk, but at that point you'll need a lawyer to get things done. And unfortunately we don't exactly have lawyers.
NAVER, witch is the hosting site of that blog, said that they would follow the public agency's decision. Saying so, they does not take any action.
Seriously, There are a lot of problems for Dr Kim who is the owner of this blog.
He is deceiving that his SCP idea is his own thing. Within the range, this site user's ideas as well as Korean SCP user's are also included.
Although I had contacted the hosting sites, rather they deleted this site from their search result. Because of the brutality of these hosting sites, many Korean are misunderstanding.
SCP Korean Wiki admins are already talk with blogger several times, but he don't admit that they were wrong by clearing his article. Now he is attempting to fabricate evidence, a charge, and a articles.
All the facts are being recorded on the RigvedaWiki(former AngelhaloWiki, Korean). If someone can read Korean, please refer to this.
Even if there is no lawyer in The SCP Foundation, Warn to him directly 'attribute' or 'delete all SCP post'. I think site admin can do it. If he ignores it, please transfer Copyright to Korea Wiki.
A bit of unfortunate reality I feel I need to address. The primary issue here is that he needs to attribute his articles to the individual authors on this website who wrote the original articles. There is not actually any legal problem with him calling his website the SCP Foundation Korean Branch. You guys might not like it, but you do not have any legal position to tell him to stop. We are not an incorporated organization with a copyrighted name.
He has the correct Creative Commons License. If he attributed to us properly, then his site would be completely legitimate. This does not mean that we would support his website or recognize it as official, but it does mean that there is nothing you could to to make him take it down.
But because he did NOT attribute to us properly, then we can try to do what Sorts said and see if the host site will take him down. But I see that you guys have already been trying that without success.
The reality here is that the only people who could take legal action against him and win are the individual authors of each individual article that he is hosting without proper attribution. And that would only apply to that article, not his entire website. There is no person who can take legal action against him for using the name "SCP Foundation", as that falls under Fair Use.
The only Korean website that we have officially supported is yours, you are linked from the front page. Anyone who does not know which site is the real website can be shown that as proof that you're the "real" Korean SCP website. But I do not believe there is much you can do to stop him other than what you have already done. The administration of this website can try to contact him to ask him to stop, or we can try contacting his web host to ask to have him taken down. But if they do not listen to us then I do not know what else we can do for you.
Prof Hiro, I really do think we do not really have to care about Dr. Kim anymore. We are the only Korean site linked to the original site. For that host site, ignore it.
Yes, I understand it seems unfair,
and Yes, I know this guy is infringing things.
Seriously, we do not need to think about this site name. We are Korean wiki. The only problem is that he does not attribute to the main site and his users. Simple. And because of that, I warned him several times about this problem. But both the host site and Dr. Kim is still unaware(or just ignoring) of this license problems. Don't worry about it. Even if it seems like the Korean wiki does not like their site, it is apart with their license problem. It's OK. If that causes a problem, that's Dr. Kim's problem. We really don't need to care deeply about that license problem. Just watch, and be aware about it.
Well, I know about it. but there are different matters.
Naver users more than 70% of Korean users, and they manipulate search results. Therefore, most of the SCP Korean users will go towards the blog.
As a result, the people most harmed are our site users. Knowing that you cannot understand from the standpoint of you and your site, I think the problem is serious.
Well begun is half done. If you neglect this, this problem will boomerang on you. Even if you do not sue, Minimal action is needed.
pardon?
They are joking with you. Both Bright and Bland were being non-serious in their replies. We do that a lot here. We do not have an "elite legal team", we just have a few members of Senior Staff who are willing to try to make sure people follow licensing correctly(mainly Sorts, Clef, and me I think…no offense to anyone I'm not thinking of).
Could an example of an attribution to just the main page be provided? Currently there are only examples for references specific articles.
Also, I was wondering what might happen to articles that are deleted over time?
Attribution to the main page is a bit silly, as it is not a work that people would probably care about having attribution for. But, then again if someone's work was really truly derivative of the main page specifically, then I suppose it *is* creative commons still, and thus still *technically* requires attribution.
In that case you should probably go with:
(name of the work here) is based on "scp-wiki.net" by "The Administrator": www.scp-wiki.net
Though the current main page is mostly written by TroyL, alas :P so you might want to mention him too somewhere in there.
But seriously. This is an instance of something that doesn't really matter so much. Our main page is just our news, links and updates, not a work by an author who's going to get upset for failing to credit them. Though admittedly if someone was just claiming our main page as their own then depending on the context we as a site might get irritated about it.
As for articles that are deleted over time - they still need to be referenced. It's not your responsibility to make sure that the original link is still intact, just that you reference where it WAS posted, what it was called, and who it was by.
This is a good example of why it's necessary to include both the title of the work and to credit the author. If an article gets deleted and then replaced by something someone else wrote, then if your attribution includes all the information, someone going to the new page will realize from the title or the author name that this is not the article they are looking for, and that they will have to keep looking deeper to find the original work.
If you have trouble finding the original work to reference, I recommend searching on www.archive.org, which generally has the pertinent information. If you are still having trouble finding the information you need, ask someone on Senior Staff to assist you.
I've got a question; is any character or story that's hosted on this site no longer considered the property of the original creator?
For example, if I created a character, and featured that character in an SCP story posted here, I wouldn't be able to use that character for any unrelated stories I may try to publish and market?
Not entirely correct. You can use any character here for anything you'd like to market later. But only if you release that work under the CC/BY/SA 3.0 or compatible license. That means:
- anyone can reproduce the work in whole or in part for free so long as they credit you.
- You credit the SCP wiki and your own work on it as the source of the character
- You allow anyone else to take any part of that story or that character and use it in their own work as they see fit, so long as they also use the CC/BY/SA 3.0 or compatible license.
In short, trying to monetize anything you find on this site or anything that you give to this site is a bad idea. But it is, strictly speaking, possible.
Is there a link to this CC/BY/SA 3.0?
At the very very very very bottom of every page:
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License
Oh! Didn't even register that it was down there, thanks!
A bit of a necropost but pertinent information to your question I feel…
A caveat to what Fortune said: if you created a character in other stories you had written previously, and then you later include your character in stories relating to SCP, this WOULD give people the right to use your character in the context of what was in the content on SCP…however this did not give them the right to use the character in the context of the other stories you had written previously. For all intents and purposes legally, the character on SCP and the character in your other stories would be separate entities.
If people used your character in reference solely to the stories on SCP and attributed/licensed correctly, then they'd be fine. But if they referred to anything you had written elsewhere that didn't reference SCP at all, you could go after them for infringement, because that content was not released under CC. Similarly, since you were the original creator of the character, you would be able to continue to write stories with the character unrelated to SCP without any possibility of infringement.
If you created the character specifically for SCP and then later wrote stories about them……..then you might be able to get away with that still as long as you referred to no SCP materials. Original authorship doesn't go away just because it's posted here first. All that matters there is using anyone else's original materials.
It really is such a big legal mess with technicalities around every corner.
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
