Guidelines for reproducing external content

[Laird]

When reproducing on Psience Quest content from elsewhere, we need to be both courteous and law-abiding.

To be law-abiding means to respect copyright restrictions on the reproduction of the content of others, but beyond that, courtesy anyway suggests not reproducing significant portions of the work of others without their consent, and, for the sake of both readers of the forum and the content's original author, providing both attribution and sourcing for all external content.

We ask then that members follow these guidelines:

1. Do not reproduce content in full or in significant part* unless one or more of the following hold:
   
   • The content is not copyright and is therefore in the public domain. This is the case when one or more of the following apply:
     
     • Its copyright has expired, or,
       
     • Its author has explicitly released it into the public domain, or,
       
     • Its copyright has been forfeited, for example by its being published in the USA without a copyright notice prior to March 1, 1989, the effective date of the Berne Convention Implementation Act, or,
       
     • It is a work of the US Government.
       
   • The content is copyright but has been licensed by its author under a so-called "copyleft" licence that permits its reproduction on our forum, for example, one of the Creative Commons licences or the GNU Free Documentation License.
     
   • You have contacted the author and s/he has explicitly given you permission to post his/her content in full to the forum. In this case, please state when reproducing the content that you have sought and received permission from the author.
     
2. Limited excerpts of external content may always be reproduced, in keeping with the "fair use" provision of copyright law (see What Is Fair Use? and More Information on Fair Use). The most relevant aspect of the fair use provision in the context of our forum is content reproduced for the purposes of comment and criticism.
   
3. Always, whether reproducing content in full or reproducing only excerpts:
   
   • Differentiate the reproduced content from your own words in a clear way, such as by enclosing it between markers something like "--- Begin quoted article ---" and "--- End quoted article ---", or by using the forum's "quote" function, or by otherwise styling it, for example by changing its font type, colour, or size, or by italicising, emboldening, or underlining it.
     
   • Provide attribution: supply both the name of the original author/publisher and the original source of the content, linking to that source if possible.
     

A moderator may - either privately or publicly - request that the author of a post failing to comply with these guidelines bring it into compliance. Should the author refuse or fail to respond in a timely fashion, a moderator may edit the post to bring it into compliance.

* A "significant part" of a work is roughly that which exceeds the maximum portion beyond which reproduction without permission is discourteous to the original author, as well as that which exceeds the maximum portion compatible with the "fair use" provision of copyright law for copyright works reproduced without permission. For our purposes on this forum, we might say that for text it is anything more than roughly three or four short paragraphs.

Note: If you wish to question, criticise, suggest changes to, or otherwise comment on these guidelines, please do that in the Draft for comment: Guidelines for reproducing external content thread.

[Ninshub]

A little reminder about these rules for the forum, and a little clarification after PMs were sent to some members about their posts.

In regards to what is excerpted from an external source (i.e. an article), there isn't a strict limit about the numbers of paragraphs allowed (say 2 to 3), but a relatively small portion of the article should be used (a little more can be quoted if the article is quite long), not all or most of it. Use your own judgement on this matter.

If you a) do the above, b) make sure what is quoted is marked off as not your own words, and c) include a link (and preferably the author's name if there is one), that should be fine.