Forum:SH:Removal of Template:Copyright

Hi all. As you may have seen in the recent changes or Wiki Activity, I (with the help of Trak Nar, so thanks Trak!) have begun removing Copyright from fan fiction segments that have been tagged with it. You may recall that I posted this blog introducing that template as a way for you to reserve the rights to your fan fiction to yourself, thus superseding the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license that this wiki is licensed under.

After some conversations this week and last, it was determined that this template does not actually supersede the Creative Commons license. Therefore, because of the conflict it creates with the CC-BY-SA license, the copyright template is being removed. For those who may be thinking as much, please note that I am not changing the license of your fan fiction pages. You never actually reserved all of the rights to the content, as the pages were always CC-BY-SA. The copyright template was effectively useless.

To remind everyone, we still have our own local editing policy that governs how fan fiction (and fanon) can be used and edited on Star Wars Fanon. Off of Star Wars Fanon, though, anyone is still free to reuse the content under the CC-BY-SA license so long as they a) properly attribute the content and be) release it under the same or a compatible license when they re-use it. It is impossible to legally restrict the re-use of the content.

If you want to attach additional Creative Commons conditions for the re-use of text (such as "Non-commercial" or "No derivatives"), or if you want to reserve the rights of content to yourself, you can still upload your fan fics as a .PDF file&mdash;which is what I do, to use the "No derivatives" condition. However, I advise doing that only for future content you release; deleting and then changing the license of current content doesn't revoke the previous license if the content has been re-used by another person elsewhere.

Sorry to catch you all by surprise with this. If you have any questions as we continue to remove the template from pages, please post them in the discussion section below. Thanks. - Brandon Rhea (talk)  04:40, May 15, 2012 (UTC)