Help:Image license

The benefits of CC-BY-SA-3.0

An image license is the permission granted by the image's author to reuse it. A license describes the conditions under which it may be used.

With a few exceptions (such as personal photos reserved for one's user page), Vikidia only accepts images under a so-called free license. Either the author (the person who took the photo) uploads the image and chooses a license, or they upload an image from another site for which the author has already provided a license allowing its reuse. In this case, we copy the license they have assigned to the image.

Licenses are used to determine what you are allowed to do with the image.

Different licenses

If you have taken a photo of a place, an animal... or created a personal drawing/diagram, choose, for example, {{cc-by-sa-3.0}} and indicate that you are the author. In France, you cannot, in theory, apply the {{PD}} public domain license to your works.

List of licenses currently accepted on Vikidia

License	Template to copy
Public domain
Original work	{{PD-author}}
Older work	{{PD-old}}
U.S. Government	{{PD-US}}
Creative Commons Licenses
"Attribution-ShareAlike" 4.0	{{CC-BY-SA-4.0}}
"Attribution-ShareAlike" 3.0	{{cc-by-sa-3.0}}
"Attribution-ShareAlike" 2.5	{{cc-by-sa-2.5}}
"Attribution-ShareAlike" ≤ 2.5	{{CC-BY-SA}}
GNU Licenses
Free Documentation (GFDL)	{{GFDL}}
General Public (GPL)	{{GPL}}
Specific permission
Permission with conditions	{{Copyright with permission}}
Others
There are many other possibilities.	See Category:License templates for the complete list.

Why allow even commercial uses?

• Licenses beginning with CC (for Creative Commons) are licenses that allow for free distribution. These are the most common and simplest. There are different versions and types of CC licenses. However, Vikidia does not accept those that do not allow modification of the content or that do not allow commercial use (see #Licenses not allowed on Vikidia below).
• The GFDL is an option for images, audio, or text. This content is then completely free to be distributed and modified by anyone, provided that a list of authors is included. The downside is that if the image is used in print, the full text of the license must be included.

Licenses not allowed on Vikidia

Two policy decisions were made to align with Wikipedia's rules by excluding:

• licenses that prohibit editing, such as CC-BY-ND: Vikidia:Decision-making/Prohibition on editing protected images (in French);
• licenses that prohibit commercial reuse, such as CC-BY-NC: Vikidia:Decision-making/Non-commercial (in French), see the comic strip on the side =>

Exceptions/special cases

• {{Logo}}
• {{Personal image}}
• {{Recent building}}

Filling in image information and the license

This is done by filling out this template on the image page:

{{file information
 | Description = 
 | Source      = 
 | Licence     = 
 | Author      = 
 | Date        = 
}}

(Copy and paste if necessary.)

Public domain

When the image's author has been dead for more than 70 years, the image (or another work by the author) is considered to be in the public domain. If you know that an image falls into this category, use {{PD-old}}.

Copyright

Images that do not have a license provided by their author and are not in the public domain are protected by copyright. They are prohibited on Vikidia and will be deleted as soon as they are detected.

• If the author has clearly stated that they authorize any reuse without specifying a license, it is possible to use the {{Copyright with permission}} template. You must provide a link where the copyright holder’s statement can be read. For example, this image: File:Dolphin's head.jpg, which is such a case.

Images from Wikimedia Commons

These images are monitored by Commons administrators, and their licenses are generally valid. You can use Commons images directly without having to download them, and is in fact recommended that you do so that Vikidia can save on storage space.

Important notice

• Please note: if a person is depicted in your photo, you must obtain their consent to publish the image.
• There are certain restrictions on architectural landmarks that you may publish. For example, it is not permitted to publish a photo containing the Louvre Pyramid.
• The same applies to photos of contemporary works of art (paintings, sculptures, buildings). Book covers, magazine covers, photos of CDs, and posters are also protected by copyright. They are protected by copyright laws and will be removed from the server.

See also

• Help:Image
• Help:Uploading an image
• Project:Images
• Vikidia:List of free stock photo sites
• Help:Copyright because texts are also protected by copyright.

Help portal — All help pages on Vikidia.

Source : This page has been adapted from the page « Aide:Licence des images » on Vikidia in French. (Authors list)