MU Wiki:Copyrights

The text of MU Wiki is copyrighted by MU Wiki editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the Mumbai University public under one or several liberal licenses. Most of MU Wiki's text and many of its images are co-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Some text has been imported only under CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA-compatible license and cannot be reused under GFDL; such text will be identified either on the page footer, in the page history or the discussion page of the article that utilizes the text. Every image has a description page which indicates the license under which it is released or, if it is non-free, the rationale under which it is used.

The licenses MU Wiki uses grant free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. MU Wiki content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and acknowledgment of the authors of the MU Wiki article used is included (a link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement; see below for more details). Copied MU Wiki content will therefore remain free under appropriate license and can continue to be used by anyone subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom. This principle is known as copyleft in contrast to typical copyright licenses.

To this end,


 * Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify Wikipedia's text under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and, unless otherwise noted, the GNU Free Documentation License. unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts.
 * A copy of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License is included in the section entitled "Wikipedia:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License"
 * A copy of the GNU Free Documentation License is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
 * Content on MU Wikipedia is covered by disclaimers.

The English text of the CC-BY-SA and GFDL licenses is the only legally binding restriction between authors and users of MU Wiki content. What follows is our interpretation of CC-BY-SA and GFDL, as it pertains to the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute text directly to MU Wiki, you thereby license it to the public for reuse under CC-BY-SA and GFDL (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Non-text media may be contributed under a variety of different licenses that support the general goal of allowing unrestricted re-use and re-distribution. See Guidelines for images and other media files, below.

If you want to import text that you have found elsewhere or that you have co-authored with others, you can only do so if it is available under terms that are compatible with the CC-BY-SA license. You do not need to ensure or guarantee that the imported text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License, unless you are its sole author. Furthermore, please note that you cannot import information which is available only under the GFDL. In other words, you may only import text that is (a) single-licensed under terms compatible with the CC-BY-SA license or (b) dual-licensed with the GFDL and another license with terms compatible with the CC-BY-SA license. If you are the sole author of the material, you must license it under both CC-BY-SA and GFDL.

If the material, text or media, has been previously published and you wish to donate it to MU Wiki under appropriate license, you will need to verify copyright permission through one of our established procedures. If you are not a copyright holder, you will still need to verify copyright permission; see the Using copyrighted work from others section below.

You retain copyright to materials you contribute to MU Wiki, text and media. Copyright is never transferred to MU Wiki. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract or alter the license for copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain so licensed until they enter the public domain when your copyright expires (currently some decades after an author's death).