FamilyLawWiki:Copyrights

Copyright of Family Law Wiki
By writing for Family Wiki you agree to assign copyright to the Family Law Wiki project.

Items published in this Wiki are under the Creative Commons Share Alike License [CSAG], this allows others to use the material, even for commercial purposes.

Inclusion of other works
As noted in Notes_for_authors you should not include entire documents where the copyright would conflict with the CSAG, but small excerpts would seem to be considered fair use.

The relevant UK act of Parliament seems to be the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). Most of this talks about copies of works, the assumption seems to be copies of entire works, we are only going to want to quote small parts and give a reference to the entire work.


 * What we are likely to be quoting (things like case law) would seem to be "literary works" as defined in section 3 of the act.
 * The fair dealing in which we are going to be using these works are one or both of:
 * section 29 Research and private study,
 * section 30 Criticism, review and news reporting, in this case we must give sufficient acknowledgement of a work that is available to the public.

The CDPA is somewhat vague on what is meant by fair dealing, but the University of Huddersfield provides the following which seems to be useful, it is short and should be read by all contributors to Family Law Wiki: 

References to Other works
A reference to another work is not copyright infringement since a copy of the work is not held in Family Law Wiki. Examples of references are:
 * Books and periodicals: full title, ISBN, publisher
 * Documents else where on the Internet, a URL or web address. In this case it is the individual reader of Family Law Wiki who obtains the copy and the computer on which the document resides is quite capable of imposing access restrictions if the owner so desires. We should always make it clear that this is an external URL, ie not pretend that it is part of this site.

Caveat: this page was not written by someone with special knowledge of the subject.