The license MyPolokwane.com uses grants free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement). Wikipedia articles therefore will remain free under the GFDL and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom.

To this end, the text contained in Wikipedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by Wikipedia contributors and licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at MyPolokwane.com - Text of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.

A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Content on MyPolokwane.com is covered by disclaimers.

The English text of the GFDL is the only legally binding document between authors and users of MyPolokwane.com content. What follows is our interpretation of the GFDL, as it pertains to the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

IMPORTANT: If you wish to reuse content from MyPolokwane.com, first read the Reusers' rights and obligations section. You should then read the GNU Free Documentation License.

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to MyPolokwane.com, you thereby license it to the public under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). In order to contribute, you must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either

• you hold the copyright to the material, for instance because you produced it yourself, or
• you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under GFDL, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under GFDL.

In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the GFDL license for the copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain under GFDL until they enter the public domain. (If the material has been previously published, you will need to verify permission through one of our established procedures. See MyPolokwane.com - Donating copyrighted materials for details.)

In the second case, if you incorporate external GFDL materials, as a requirement of the GFDL, you need to acknowledge the authorship and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy.
 

Using copyrighted work from others

All works are copyrighted unless either they fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. If you use part of a copyrighted work under "fair dealing", or if you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of our license, you must make a note of that fact (along with names and dates). See MyPolokwane.com - Requesting copyright permission for the procedure for asking a copyright holder to grant us a license to use their work under the terms of the GFDL and verifying that license has been provided. It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of MyPolokwane.com's material as possible, so original images, sound, and video files licensed under the GFDL or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair dealing.

Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt the project. If in doubt, write it yourself.

Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to MyPolokwane.com, so long as you do not paraphrase the source too closely. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference.

Linking to copyrighted works

Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any MyPolokwane.com article which cites its sources will link to copyrighted material. It is not necessary to obtain the permission of a copyright holder before linking to copyrighted material, just as an author of a book does not need permission to cite someone else's work in their bibliography. Likewise, MyPolokwane.com is not restricted to linking only to GFDL-free or open-source content.

Context is also important; it may be acceptable to link to a bookseller website's page on a particular book, even if it presents an image of that book (such uses are generally either explicitly permitted by publishers or allowed under fair dealing). However, linking directly to an image of the book cover removes the context and the site's justification for permitted use or fair dealing.

Copyright violations

Contributors who repeatedly post copyrighted material despite appropriate warnings may be blocked from editing by any administrator to prevent further problems.

If you suspect a copyright violation, you should at least bring up the issue on that page's comments. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed (MyPolokwane.com will soon add an option that will allow users to flag content as 'Copyright violation'). Some cases will be false alarms. For example, text that can be found elsewhere on the Web that was in fact copied from MyPolokwane.com in the first place is not a copyright violation on MyPolokwane.com's part.

Reusers' rights and obligations

If you want to use MyPolokwane.com materials in your own books/articles/websites or other publications, you can do so -- but only in compliance with the GFDL. If you are simply duplicating the MyPolokwane.com article, you must follow section two of the GFDL on verbatim copying..

If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails the following:

• your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL,
• you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B), and
• you must provide access to the "transparent copy" of the material (section 4J). (The "transparent copy" of a MyPolokwane.com article is any of a number of formats available from us, including the article text, the html web pages, xml feed, etc.)

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the MyPolokwane.com article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that MyPolokwane.com makes no guarantee to retain authorship information and a transparent copy of articles. Therefore, you are encouraged to provide this authorship information and a transparent copy with your derived works.

Example notice

An example notice, for an article that uses the MyPolokwane.com article Some people do not understand the value of a social media platform might read as follows:

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the MyPolokwane.com article "Some people do not understand the value of a social media platform".

("Some people do not understand the value of a social media platform" and the URLs enclosed in the above must of course be substituted as necessary.)

Alternatively you can distribute your copy of "Some people do not understand the value of a social media platform" and list at least five (or all if fewer than five) principal authors on the title page (or top of the document), as explained in the text of the GFDL license. The Revision history can help you identify the principal authors. All (re-)distributed documents need to include a copy of the GFDL license text.
 

If you are the owner of MyPolokwane.com-hosted content being used without your permission

If you are the owner of content that is being used on MyPolokwane.com without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from MyPolokwane.com. You may also blank the page and replace it with the words [copyvio|URL or place you published the text] but the text will still be in the page history. Either way, we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.

This page was adapted for MyPolokwane.com from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights