Origins stories talk:Copyrights

The terms governing ethical use of the materials on origins.wikia.com should be determined by the contributors themselves. Please use this page to make constructive suggestions on how best to achieve these goals within the very complex world of intellectual property rights. When a consensus of the community is reached, the copyright page should be updated to reflect this consensus.

Goals: Basic fairness and ethics
Contributors to the Origins wiki deserve to have their contributions treated fairly and with respect. As a community, we should define as clearly as possible the ethical and moral expectations for people who use and build upon this work. We want to make those ethical uses as easy as possible.

GFDL, Public Domain, and others
To maintain compatibility with Wikipedia all material on the origins.wikia.com may be used and distributed under the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License). This license ensures that anyone who obtains a work containing material from origins.wikia.com may freely redistribute that work.

Some people feel that the GFDL introduces an undue burden on people who would modify and distribute a work. For that reason, many if not most of the articles may also be available under less restrictive licensing or may be part of the public domain.

Contributing your work
If you would like the articles and other contributions that you author to be part of the public domain or available under another license in addition to the GFDL, please place a statement to that effect on your User page. You may also place such a statement at the bottom of articles that you create and encourage others to do so. Licensing is a very complex issue and varies from country to country. For more general information on licensing alternatives, see the creative commons licenses

In general we encourage people to place their work in the public domain or use the creative commons attributions license which simply asks that people acknowledge your work when they redistribute it.

The creative commons has a well-crafted statement for contributing your work into the public domain, see. Use the public domain form to create a specific version for your work. Use "Contributions to origins.wikia.com" or the specific article you are creating as the title of the work. Also, please note that in some countries, it may not be possible to relinquish all of your rights and place your contributions in the public domain.

Anonymous contributions
Anonymous contributors do not have "User" pages. If they contribute to a page which includes a statement by the original authors that the page is in the public domain or available under additional licenses, then it should be safe to assume that the anonymous contributions can be treated in the same way. Even if they do not expressly state it, anonymous authors have seen and implicitly agree with the statement at the bottom of all submission pages: If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it here.

Requests for comments
Licensing discussions can become very complex given the many different jurisdictions and viewpoints. If you have a specific use case in mind and are wondering whether or not that fits within the spirit and letter of the terms, please post it here and give the community a chance to voice their opinions.