Copyrights
Notes about intellectual property.
Last modified: 1st of August, 2012.
THE QUESTIONS
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THE ANSWERS
1/ Tell me more about your management of copyrights.
Asides from the writeups expressly labelled as being home-grown and portraying original characters, all of the featured characters and distinctive likenesses are the intellectual property of someone else (comic book publishers or authors, writers, movie rights holders, etc.).
All trademarks and copyrights are owned by their respective owners. Each and every entry is clearly labelled as to its source - usually the comic book universe/publisher, the name and author of the book, the title of the movie, etc.
All of those copyrights, trademarks, etc. are used without authorization. The excerpts of published material (such as characters quotes, or excerpts of art used to show how the character looks) are used for educational purposes about the work of art being discussed.
None of those trademarks are used in association with any commercial venture. Writeups.org is a non-profit project, and is not intended to challenge any trademark or copyright.
The names of the entries‘ writer(s) and helpers indicate which persons wrote the text about the character and do not indicate any claim of ownership about the featured character or its depictions.
The information contained within this site has an educational purpose, allowing readers to obtain a better understanding of the characters owned by other parties.
Writeups.org remains available to edit specific writeups at the request of the properly identifed copyright holders.
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2/ Tell me more about quoting from other web sites.
The normal policy is not to reuse content that was authored by other websites. Here are the exceptions:
- A handful of entries still have a separate section where content from another, identified website is copied because we were worried that this site might disappear. Usually those were 1990s-style homepages. As it turns out, quite a few of these small sites did disappear, particularly homepages on Tripod, Geocities, etc..
- Two entire sites were fully copied (with their author‘s permission) before the Geocities shutdown. The sites we ’rescued‘ are the Knight of Shadow site and Eric Padua‘s JLA archive.
- A few of our contributors can provide stats and notes but lack the time for history sections, and use wikipedia material as such. Wikipedia is always listed as a helper, and in many cases we added an even clearer note stating that the history section was taken from Wikipedia.
- Illustrations about characters owned by Marvel, DC, Sony and other corporations will sometimes be fished on the Internet when we do not have time to generate our own scans, screen captures, screenshots, etc. These are scans, photographs, screencaps, etc. of corporately-owned characters made by other people. If it is original art, it will always be credited. For video games model extractions, custom renders, enhanced textures, etc. are considered original art for crediting purposes. For original art we will request permission unless the art is intended as a placeholder, we can‘t contact the artist, or the artist noted that the material could be used without their authorisation.
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3/ Known issues
There are two known problems where our policy has been breached.
- One is a series of writeups that quoted Marvunapp.com circa the year 2000, usually for comics we couldn‘t afford. Almost all of these entries have since been replaced by entirely rewritten and reillustrated versions, but a short and steadily dwindling kill list remains.
- Many of the video game console fighting games have illustrations which the webmaster thought were official art but turned out to be fan illustrations from Deviantart members. At this point I‘m stumped since I usually can‘t tell which is which.
There are also two grey areas that I know of:
- Illustrations reproduced (with full credit but no authorisation) from rapsheet.co.uk. Those were used either as placeholders, or because we use the exact same detouring techniques and produce the exact same image (and thus to save time). These illustrations were meant to be replaced eventually, but as it became clear that “eventually” was going to take years we‘ve stopped using these images.
- Illustrations by RonnieThunderbolt - these are extensively credited but we couldn‘t contact the artist for authorisation.
Again, let us know if you see something that shouldn‘t be there. Out of thousands of entries done over many years by many people there‘s inevitably bad stuff - especially for material done during the 1990s when the Internet was… different.
