User blog:Brandon Rhea/New fan fiction copyright test

Happy day before St. Patrick's Day, everybody!

I wanted to let you know that Wikia and I, with the blessing of Goodwood and Trak Nar as well, are beginning to run a test here on Star Wars Fanon in regards to fan fiction copyrights. Although we have our own definition of fanon and fan fiction here, this test applies only to fan fiction narratives&mdash;articles relating to the story, including informational ones like Star Wars: Episode I - The Chosen One, do not count.

What this test does is adds a template called Copyright onto the wiki. The template says that all rights to the content of the page that's tagged with the temple belongs to the author. So, for example, Goodwood has posted this on A Marine Went to Jedi Camp/Chapter One, which was written by him. All rights to that, excluding previously copyrighted material (Star Wars words and trademarks, for example), now belong to him.

The copyright
Here is what the copyright says:


 * You retain any and all Intellectual Property Rights in Content you submit to or through the Servers, Websites, or other areas of the Service. By submitting your Content to Wikia.com, you hereby grant Wikia a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the Service. You also hereby waive any moral rights you may have in your Content and grant each user of the Wikia Service a non-exclusive license to access your Content through the Service.

The translation
So there's a bit of legalese in there. You're probably wondering what that actually means. Here's a layman translation:


 * All content original to you which you have posted onto this wiki and marked with the “rights reserved” template is copyrighted to you (unless, of course, the copyright already belongs to someone else). When you post your content onto Star Wars Fanon, you automatically give Wikia the right to use it in any way and for any length of time. You also give everyone (including logged out visitors) the right to view and read it on this wiki. Unlike the Creative Commons license used by most content on Wikia, you do not give anyone, other than Wikia, the right to use the content in any way without your permission.

Please remember that this copyright applies ONLY if you place the copyright template onto the bottom of fan fiction content. Additionally, this may only be used for narrative content&mdash;articles including, but not limited to, topics such as characters, ships, planets, species, etc. do not apply and are licensed under Creative Commons, and the copyright template will be removed if it's placed on the wrong types of pages.

You can read Star Wars Fanon:Copyrights for more information.

The reason
So why are we testing this out here on Star Wars Fanon? For starters, it's the largest fan fiction wiki on Wikia, and being that it's about Star Wars it offers us a good opportunity to see how it works.

The main reason is to see if this attracts more fan fiction users. We always get a lot of fanon authors who sometimes write fan fiction, but there's a whole untapped market&mdash;for lack of a better term&mdash;of fan fiction authors out there on the internet who are writing actual fan fiction stories but are not posting them or writing them on Wikia wikis.

Wikia wikis offer a great set up for fan fiction&mdash;none of us would be on Star Wars Fanon if it didn't!&mdash;but the CC-BY-SA copyright on pages can scare fan fiction writers off if they're afraid that they're giving up control of their content. That's what this new template aims to test, to see if it allows fan fiction wikis on Wikia to become more attractive to fan fiction authors.

The conclusion
So that's about all I have to say about that. Feel free to sound off with your thoughts in the comments section!