Contributors’ rights and obligations

If you contribute material to CoinLink, we thereby license it to the public under the GFDL. In order to contribute, we must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either

* You hold the copyright to the material, for instance because we produced it werself, 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 we like. However, we can never retract the GFDL license for the copies of materials that we place here; these copies will remain under GFDL forever.

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

Using copyrighted work from Content Partners

Content Partners on CoinLink have given CoinLink express permission to use copy, text, images and other content from their web-sites and other sources, and have allowed CoinLink to redistribute, post and archive these materials on CoinLink. All of these works are copyrighted by the Content Partner unless either they fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. If we use part of a copyrighted work under “fair use”, or if we obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of our license, we will make a note of that fact (along with names and dates). It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of CoinLink’s material as possible, and images and content licensed under the GFDL or used under fair use.

CoinLink endevers to Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others.

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 yourr own words, and submit it to CoinLink.

Linking to Copyrighted Works

Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any CoinLink 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, CoinLink is not restricted to linking only to GFDL-free or open-source content.

However, if we know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of the creator’s copyright, we do not link to that copy of the work. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has be considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States (Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry). Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else’s work sheds a bad light on CoinLink and its editors. The copyright status of Internet archives in the United States is unclear, however. It is currently acceptable to link to Internet archives.

If we find a copyright infringement

If you suspect a copyright infringement, Please Contact CoinLink. We can then examine the situation and take action if needed. The most helpful piece of information we can provide is a URL or other reference to what we believe may be the source of the text.

Some cases will be false alarms. For example, if the contributor was in fact the author of the text that is published elsewhere under different terms, that does not affect our right to post it here under the GFDL. Also, sometimes we will find text elsewhere on the Web that was copied from CoinLink.

If some of the content of a page really is an infringement, then the infringing content will be removed. If the author’s permission is obtained later, the text may be restored.

In extreme cases of contributors continuing to post copyrighted material after appropriate warnings, such users will be blocked from contributing to CoinLink.

Image guidelines

Images and photographs, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone holds the copyright unless they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Images on the internet need to be licensed directly from the copyright holder or someone able to license on their behalf. In some cases, fair use guidelines may allow a photograph to be used.

Image description pages will be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images. Untagged or incorrectly-tagged images will be deleted. In addition, CoinLink will often Add custom graphics and images to a news item or article for illustative purposes. These images, illustrations and graphics are NOT copyrighted by the source of the original content, and CoinLink reserves the rights to these custom images.

U.S. government photographs

Works produced by civilian and military employees of the United States federal government in the scope of their employment are public domain by statute in the United States (though they may be protected by copyright outside of the U.S.).

However, not every work republished by the U.S. government falls into this category. The U.S. government can own copyrights that are assigned to it by others — for example, works created by contractors.

CoinLink contributors should respect the copyright law

Under CoinLink’s current copyright conditions, and with the current facilities, it is only possible to include in CoinLink external GFDL materials that contain invariant sections or cover texts, if all of the following apply,

1. You are the copyright holder of these external GFDL materials (or: we have the explicit, i.e. written, permission of the copyright holder to do what follows);
2. The length and nature of these invariant sections and cover texts does not exceed what can be placed in an edit summary;
3. You are satisfied that these invariant sections and cover texts are not listed elsewhere than in the “page history” of the page where these external materials are placed;
4. You are satisfied that further copies of CoinLink content are distributed under the standard GFDL application of “with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts”

5. The original invariant sections and/or cover texts are contained in the edit summary of the edit with which we introduce the thus GFDLed materials in wikipedia (so, that if “permanent deletion” would be applied to that edit, both the thus GFDLed material and its invariant sections and cover texts are jointly deleted).

Reusers’ rights and obligations

If we want to use CoinLink materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, Please contact CoinLink for permission as some materials on the site fall outside the GFDL and we can direct you to the appropriate copyright holder to obtain permission. 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
* You must provide access to the “transparent copy” of the material. (The “transparent copy” of a CoinLink article is any of a number of formats available from us, including the original 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 CoinLink article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that CoinLink 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 yourr derived works.

Example notice

An example notice, for an article that uses the CoinLink article “Sample”variable might read as follows:
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the CoinLink article “Sample”.

Fair use materials and special requirements

All original CoinLink text is distributed under the GFDL. CoinLink articles may also include quotations, images, or other media under the U.S. Copyright law “fair use” doctrine in accordance with our guidelines for non-free content. It is preferred that these be obtained under the most free content license practical (such as the GFDL or public domain). In cases where no such images/content are currently available, then fair use may be used in certain circumstances .

In CoinLink, such “fair use” material is always identified as from an external source.