Can you host a version of Wikipedia on your own domain and charge for it? I am reading through these notes, trying to piece together a picture of what the rules/laws are regarding Wikipedia content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Copyright#Can_I_reuse_Wikipedia's_content_somewhere_else? I don't have any desire or intention of doing this myself, but I am wondering if I create a site like Wikipedia, which has &quot;freely licensed/usable content&quot;, if someone else is going to go ahead and clone my project and slap it under a new domain, change some fonts and colors, slap on a subscription fee and maybe some ads, and try and rank higher on Google Search so they become the dominant provider of my underlying content. So Wikipedia is a parallel, how does Wikipedia prevent someone from downloading a bulk dump of the whole site, putting it under their own custom domain like freeknowledgefoo.com, slap some ads around in the pages, and add a subscription fee. Then they maybe redesign a few things slightly (changing fonts and colors), and then for whatever reason they end up ranking higher than Wikipedia itself on Google and end up being used by default instead of Wikipedia. That would be a horrible scenario, which would mean that all the work is put into Wikipedia, but all the money is made by some copycat site. How does Wikipedia prevent that? How could I prevent that if I am offering free data dumps of various kinds, but myself have a UI to view the data (like NYC's open data site). So you can download the dump and run the site yourself, or use my precomposed main website hosting and showing the data. How do I prevent users from just deploying my project on their own domain, slightly changing things, and then they run off with the future? Is this what the &quot;ShareAlike&quot; license is for? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License Creative Commons Deed This is a human-readable summary of the full license below. You are free: to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to Remix—to adapt the work for any purpose, even commercially. Under the following conditions: Attribution—You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.) Share Alike—If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license. With the understanding that: Waiver—Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Other Rights—In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license: your fair dealing or fair use rights; the author's moral rights; and rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights. Notice—For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do that is with a link to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ I don't see anything saying you can't do what I describe. But maybe the fact that you have to have &quot;attribution&quot; is the key? I don't quite know how best to approach this situation. On one hand I would like to release data which is free and open source. On the other hand I don't want someone else to then run off with all of it and try and outcompete me with the same product I guess.
It's allowed by the Creative Commons Attribution -ShareAlike license, and intentionally so. The Wikimedia Foundation wants things like this to be possible; that is part of the goal of open content. (This license is also used on Stack Exchange content, so the same applies to e.g. this answer.) However, it is important to remember that this is not a public-domain equivalent license. If you copy from a Wikipedia article (or an SE post), you must comply with the &quot;Attribution&quot; and &quot;ShareAlike&quot; requirements. Attribution: You must give credit to the author. For Wikipedia articles, which typically have many authors, a link to the page is sufficient; editors agree to this in addition to the license when they save their edits. For Stack Exchange content, a link to the post itself should be enough. (To get a link to a post, click the &quot;share&quot; link below the post.) ShareAlike: If you modify the content, you must release your modified version under the same or a compatible license. You can't copy this answer, add more information (or translate it into another language, or make any other change), and keep an all-rights-reserved copyright on it, or release it into the public domain; your version must also be released under CC BY-SA. As long as you follow these requirements, copying is allowed and encouraged.
How do you know if the copyright claimant or owner of them material you are using is allowing their content on Youtube? You don't. ... does fair use automatically cover you for anything related to this? No Is it illegal to share the music experience of a legally purchased MP3 ... or to provide services that play songs ... but are not hosted by your website (in which case you just act as a pointer to other sites which are participating in illegal activities)? Yes What rights/privileges can cover you if you wish to participate in this? None I've heard (rumours probably with no legal standing), that as long as you are not monetizing their material, you will not have any legal action taken against you. You probably won't have action taken against you. That said, you probably won't get busted for smoking weed in your basement. Lack of enforcement makes it no less illegal. What copyright means Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to its use and distribution, usually for a limited time. The exclusive rights are not absolute; they are limited by limitations and exceptions to copyright law, including fair use. The copyright holder decides how, when and by whom their work can be used and copied. At some point this right expires and the work passes into the public domain. It is not trivial to determine what works are public domain and what are not as it depends on the copyright law in the country they were created in at the time of creation and how that law has changed subsequently. In most of the world, the default length of copyright is currently the life of the author plus either 50 or 70 years. Many jurisdictions also grant workers for hire moral copyright in their creative work even when the proprietorial copyright vests with their employer. Copyright comes into existence automatically; it doesn't need to be registered or denoted in any way. For example, I have copyright in this answer and you have copyright in your question. A few countries (the USA among them) have a copyright register but that only limits the remedies an unregistered copyright holder has; failing to register does not negate copyright. Further, a single work can have multiple copyright holders: a music video for example has (barring contractual arrangements): the composer(s) holds copyright in the music the lyricist(s) holds copyright in the lyrics the performer(s) hold copyright in the music performance the actor(s) (if any) holds copyright in the acting the producer(s)/director(s) holds copyright in the finished product. In practice, most of these people have contracts which give their copyright to someone else. Almost certainly, every MP3 of every song is covered by copyright; that is, someone, somewhere owns the copyright; that is at least one someone. How can you tell who that is? Often, in the absence of a claim of copyright, you can't. Obviously, if it is a song published by a record label than its pretty obvious that they hold copyright on it and you don't need to worry about the deals they have with the artist/composer etc. Remember, copyright violations are a civil matter; the state does not get involved. It is up to each individual copyright holder to take whatever action they wish under the law to protect their rights.
Although you aren't interested in the TOS, you should be. You are not allowed to make any copy of other people's stuff without permission. The TOS is how you get permission. First, the author uploads his material to You Tube, because he has an account and the TOS associated with the account specifies the license that he grants to You Tube and the world – same thing with Stack Exchange. The TOS says (roughly) &quot;when you upload stuff, you give permission for others to access your stuff using the You Tube interface&quot;. Content-consumers likewise are allowed to stream content using their interface, but not generally download. (The license terms changes over time – previously there were more license types). Specifically, You are not allowed to: access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as expressly authorized by the Service; or (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders; and they don't expressly authorize ordinary download, you have to use their interface. You might also directly contact the author of the work in question and negotiate a deal where you can directly acquire a license from the rights-owner. But if you want to access the material via You Tube, you have to do it in a way that is permitted, and You Tube says that you're not permitted to download. Any &quot;copying without permission&quot; is infringement.
Not on its own, no Overview A ToS can be of some value, but will not fully protect the site operator (host). For one thing, a ToS is probably not binding on the user based on a contract of adhesion such as &quot;by using this site you agree to...&quot;. A specific act, such as clicking a checkbox that defaults to clicked or activating an &quot;I accept the terms&quot; button is probably required to make a ToS binding on the user. But a host must do more that obtain an agreement to its ToS. Once it has actual knowledge of illegal content, a host must take action to remove or disable it, or else it may be liable as if it had posted the content itself. It also depends what kind of &quot;something illegal&quot; is involved. The most common form is perhaps content that allegedly infringes copyright. Safe Harbor In the EU Article 14 of the EU Directive on electronic commerce (Directive 2000/31/EC) will apply (note that being a directive, rather than a regulation, 2000/31/EC) depends on implementation in national law, which may vary from one country to another. Article 14 reads: Hosting Where an information society service is provided that consists of the storage of information provided by a recipient of the service, Member States shall ensure that the service provider is not liable for the information stored at the request of a recipient of the service, on condition that: (a) the provider does not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information and, as regards claims for damages, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity or information is apparent; or (b) the provider, upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the information. Paragraph 1 shall not apply when the recipient of the service is acting under the authority or the control of the provider. This Article shall not affect the possibility for a court or administrative authority, in accordance with Member States' legal systems, of requiring the service provider to terminate or prevent an infringement, nor does it affect the possibility for Member States of establishing procedures governing the removal or disabling of access to information. Article 14 means that when a host obtains actual knowledge of infringing or otherwise illegal content, the host must promptly delete that content or disable access to it. Such knowledge could come via a takedown notice. According to the page &quot;Copyright infringement and remedies in Germany&quot;: One of the main situations refers to platform operators. Once they have been informed about a specific infringement on their platform, they are required to remove the specific infringing content and to implement measures in order to prevent future violations. See also the Wikipedia article &quot;Notice and Take down&quot; which discusses Article 14, and points out that it does not define a specific notice and take down procedure, unlike the US provisions of 17 USC 512 (which includes the DMCA notice and take down procedure, and the related Safe Harbor provisions). Since Article 14 clearly envisages some sort of notice procedure, but not specific procedure has been defined in the laws of most EU member states, including Germany, some people use the US DMCA notice format, as describesd in this article. Such a notice may serve to give a German host &quot;actual knowledge&quot; and impose liability if the host fails to respond promptly. There have been recent legal cases which affect the procedures in such cases, as reported in &quot;Copyright 'safe harbours' for service providers need to be consistent&quot; from Pinsent Masons and &quot;Germany: Time To Hit Pause: Copyright Infringement On User Generated Platforms – When Is The Platform Provider Liable For Damages?&quot; from Morrison &amp; Foerster LLP. The Morrison &amp; Foerster article reads: Previous rulings by the CJEU have addressed both the application of the safe harbor principle set out in the EU E-Commerce Directive1 that shields hosting providers from liability for hosted unlawful third-party content of which they have no actual knowledge and, separately, the extent of infringement of copyright by hosting of, or linking to, copyright infringing third-party content under the EU Copyright Directive. But it is still unclear under which conditions the providers of the various online platforms that store and make available user-generated content, can rely on the safe harbor privilege applying to hosting providers to avoid liability, or whether they must not only take down the infringing content when they obtain knowledge of such content but also compensate the rightsholders of such content for damages for copyright infringement. The Pinsent Masons article reads: [A] ruling last year by a German court has highlighted an anomaly in the way 'safe harbour' protections ISPs enjoy under EU law apply in the case of copyright enforcement. It has confirmed that applications for blocking orders and injunctive relief are treated differently, despite the economic effect of those measures being the same. The safe harbour protections stem from the EU's E-Commerce Directive. That legislation prohibits service providers from being put under any general obligation to monitor for illegal activity by users of their service. In addition, where the service providers are mere conduits to infringing activity by others, they cannot be held liable for that activity unless and until they obtain 'actual knowledge' of the activity. At that stage, a service provider must act expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the information if they are not to be held liable themselves for infringement. However, EU copyright law cuts into these 'safe harbour' protections. It makes clear that rights holders can apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe copyright. In Germany, however, changes made to the Telemedia Act in October 2017 have spurred debate over the admissibility and the requirements of blocking injunctions. Other unlawful content Other sorts of illegal content are possible, such as neo-Nazi propaganda and Child Pornography, which are criminal under German law. In theory Article 14 applies to such content as well as to alleged copyright infringements. But since these are serious crimes, the degree of promptness expected from a host will probably be greater. Conclusion A hosting provider will need, at the least, to respond to notices alleging copyright infringement or other illegal content, and provide an address to which such notices can be sent. A host might do well to implement the full DMCA takedown procedure. ToS provisions will not provide a shield against liability after a notice is sent to the host. A host may be required to block future access by those whose previous uploads have been found to be unlawful. This may require soem sort of log-in procedure. Thus a simple ToS provision, as described in the question, particularly in the absence of any log-in mechanism, and of any enforcement of the ToS provisions, will not be enough to shield the host from liability for unlawful content posted by users.
More generally, can anyone just copy an existing website (without copying the code or images)? Yes. Could I make a website that lets people post pictures like Instagram but call it MyPics? Yes. In general, copyright protects particular expressions of ideas, not higher level ideas or concepts.
Basically, you cannot do it. You are required to include the MIT license in any derivative work. However, that holds only for the parts that you import from this other project. You can identify which parts of the final product are copied from the MIT-licensed program (and indicate "these parts are subject to the following MIT license"), and then you can do whatever you want with the remainder that you wrote. The downside of not licensing your material is that nobody can use it. To use it, people would need permission, which is what a license is. If you don't license it, you don't give permission, so people can't use it. You presumably want to subject your own contribution to different licensing conditions, so then you would state those conditions and clearly indicate what parts of the code you wrote.
Wikipedia has two kinds of pictures: Reusable pictures, most of them stored at http://commons.wikimedia.org Copyrighted pictures under fair-use, stored on the local Wikipedia (in your case, the Russian Wikipedia) but not on Commons. To know what case it is, just click on the Wikipedia picture, click on the blue "Description" button, and see whether it redirects you to Commons or not. Pictures on Commons are reusable if you include the author and license (see the full requirements). Commercial use is OK. Fair-use pictures can not be reused. Unfortunately, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Файл:Tschedrovitsky.jpg is in the second case, so you can not reuse it, even in a non-commercial setting, unless you can justify that your usage qualifies as fair-use in your country. Hopefully one day someone will find a legally reusable picture of Shchedrovitski and upload it to Commons.
Can a system include such information? it is surely technically possible. Would it be a violation of copyright? That depends. First of all, any such information can be included if the copyright holder has granted permission, probably in the form of a license. But in that case this question would probably not have been asked. I therefore assume that no permission has been granted. (It doesn't matter if a request was made and the answer was &quot;no&quot;, a request was made but ignored, or no request was ever made. No permission is still no permission.) The names of fictional locations are nor protected by copyright. Including, say, &quot;Rivendell&quot; or &quot;Hobbiton&quot; in the selection list for a timezone setting would not infringe the copyrights held by the Tolkien estate. But a map is a different thing. If the OS includes and can display a map of a fictional region, one that is copied from or based on a map published with the fiction, or by some third party, then that would almost surely be copyright infringement, and the copyright holder could choose to sue for infringement. S/he might choose not to sue, but that is a risky gamble to take. If this is in the US, statutory damages could be awarded, and could intheory go as high as $150,000, although they are not likely to be as high as that, that is just the maximum legal limit (per work infringed, not per copy). The standard is whatever amount the court thinks &quot;just&quot;, up to the maximum. (If proof of willful infringement is not made, the upper limit is $30,000, still a sizable sum.) If the OS designer created the map independently, using names from the fiction, but not otherwise basing it on the fiction, and in particular not imitating any map created by anyone else, then it may well not be infringement, but it would still be wise to consult a copyright lawyer. The question would be more helpful if it made clear just what would be hypothetically included in the OS, and to what extent it would be based on someone else's work. There is also the question of why someone would want to include fictional places, but that really doesn't change the legal issue.