OpenTaxa:Copyrights
This page details OpenTaxa's stance on copyright, as well as the copyright state of all works indexed on OpenTaxa and the text content of the OpenTaxa website and media releases themselves.
OpenTaxa is completely opposed to the monstruous shape copyright law has taken over the last decades. Alas, we prefer focusing our efforts on supporting the free and open-source movement rather than fighting the calcified brains of certain groups, under the belief that a robust, self-sufficient open world with its own tech environments, licenses, repositories, databases and learning tools will render the fabrication known as "intellectual property" as obsolete, as indeed it already has begun to. You are perfectly able to use open software on an open OS to view and contribute free content to databases like this, and you should.
The text content of OpenTaxa pages, including but not limited to the general index and specific taxon pages, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). However, the works themselves indexed on OpenTaxa are not placed under this license. OpenTaxa only releases works under free licenses, following similar definitions used by the Wikimedia Commons project as of July 2021.
As part of our stance on copyright, in the future we may link to (not distribute) copyrighted works whose copyright status is currently unenforceable, i.e. abandonware and other orphan works. Also, unlike other repositories, we will not follow unenforceable requests for takedowns of free material.
A major difference between OpenTaxa and Wikimedia Commons is the location of our servers. As we are hosted by Miraheze, OpenTaxa follows the copyright laws of a work's home country, its local laws (Brazil) plus its server's locations's laws (the UK)., instead of those from the United States. This is a small comfort, as surely that country will see a few more increases in its baseline copyright lifetime duration before a certain generation goes extinct.
In short, OpenTaxa only indexes works published under a perpetual and non-revocable license that allows distribution, republication and modification of works (even commercially). We do not accept files if their use is only permissible under fair use, educationally, or non-commercially. We do host files that may legally require you to distribute them, and any copies or derivatives created, under the same license; or that may require you to credit their author in order to use them, so please observe the license of the assets carefully when downloading and using an asset.
Well-known licenses[edit source]
The following licenses are preferred for materials on OpenTaxa (this list was adapted from Commons:Licensing):
- Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike licenses
- GNU General Public License (GPL) / GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
- Free Art License/Licence Art Libre (FAL/LAL)
- Open Data Commons, for freely licensed databases where the contents are also free or available under a free license or cannot be separated from the database [1].
- OGA-BY 3.0 - A license based on CC-BY 3.0 that removes that license's restriction on technical measures that prevent redistribution of a work (DRM).
| Creative Commons license icons and names | Abbreviations & versions | OK here? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
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CC Public Domain Mark 1.0 |  Generally OK
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Often found on Flickr images, and considered to be freely licensed in most circumstances. - see Public Domain section below |
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CC0 |  OK
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CC-BY (1.0 2.0 2.5 3.0 4.0) | OK
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CC-BY-SA (1.0 2.0 2.5 3.0 4.0) | OK
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CC-BY-NC (1.0 2.0 2.5 3.0 4.0) |  Not OK
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CC-BY-NC-ND (1.0 2.0 2.5 3.0 4.0) | Not OK
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CC-BY-NC-SA (1.0 2.0 2.5 3.0 4.0) | Not OK
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CC-BY-ND (1.0 2.0 2.5 3.0 4.0) | Not OK
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| Notes on the symbols | |||
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In the case of public domain works, pre-existing works are only indexed if they have been released as CC0 or if they have entered the public domain in all relevant jurisdictions by virtue of copyright expiration or nonapplicable copyright.
The only exceptions for this pattern of licenses are the OpenTaxa logo itself, which cannot be reused without written permission, and some templates imported from Wikipedia, which are co-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA 3.0) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). All such templates and any eventual dependencies are clearly labeled as being imported from Wikipedia in their documentation.
- See also: OpenTaxa:General disclaimer