Avoiding Copyright Infringement Options

[Marina]

A friendly reminder that our Rules & Guidelines state

Posting any copyrighted material without the express permission of the copyright holder is forbidden - unless such copyright is owned by the MS People.com Forum or by you.

This means that it is not allowed to copy and paste any of the following into any topic on this forum:

• articles;
• any part of articles, other than possibly a few short words;
• graphics;
• any other items from websites;
• text from someone else's emails, PMs, documents etc;
• text from someone else's posts in topics from another forum;

unless you have and can show you have explicit permission from the website, photographer, artist, writer, or other "creator", to reproduce the item or unless the website makes it clear that the item is in the "public domain" and is free to reproduce anywhere without permission or licence - as it risks being infringement of copyright.

This includes items from other MS sites, such as the MS Society: http://www.mssociety.org.uk/help/site_poli.../copyright.html. Jokes are mostly (but not always) in the public domain.

More about Copyright here, in simple terms: 10 Big Myths about copyright explained

If you wish to bring attention to articles etc from other websites, you must instead link to the website page the article is on. You may add the title of the article above your link. Some news sites may allow copying of the first few words as an intro to the link, some may not. So, if in doubt - don't copy anything.

If copyrighted items are found or brought to our attention, the moderators will delete any such content - unless evidence of permission to reproduce has been given. If this should happen to you, please don't take it badly: it's for your protection against any possible legal action.

[Marina]

Jokes are mostly (but not always) in the public domain.

Just to clarify about jokes and copyright, being as I was asked in the Jokes section if a joke I posted could be posted elsewhere.

The majority of jokes are in the public domain, meaning they can freely be copied. Generally speaking, this applies to the zillions of jokes found on joke websites or mailing lists. These jokes have also often been rewritten or altered over decades, so they end up morphing into various different versions of the same joke.

Very occasionally, a long or clever joke may be attributed to someone, in which case that person's name is given a credit at the end of it and is perhaps best to be retained. Very rarely, one may see someone's name next to a joke with a © symbol next to it, in which case this must be retained in full when posting the joke.

More here when it comes to jokes told by comedians on stage rather than jokes easily found on the internet: http://www.writewords.org.uk/forum/46_307700.asp

If swiping jokes from websites and you're unsure if they're free to copy or not, look for a link to any copyright information (usually at the bottom of the page) to check if the jokes are in the public domain or copyrighted. Mostly, they might only be copyrighted if it's on the website of a particular comedian who writes his own jokes.