Board Thread:Community Announcements and Events/@comment-4544033-20150130025949/@comment-4984687-20150201192834

SuperSajuuk wrote: How can you "steal" from a site that uses copyrighted images (which we also use [not directly from them]) and freely reusable text? I'd like to know how anything can be considered "stolen" when the images are copyrighted to Bethesda and the text is copyrighted to nobody in particular. Hell, if Bethesda really wanted to, they could come here and have our images taken down because the copyright belongs to them. Nobody "owns" anything on a wiki, unless they created the image themselves from scratch (which no image from games will be)

Whether you realise it or not, all text on UESP is reusable. That is what the license terms state. They use the same license type that we use, which allows users to copy it and reuse it with attribution. The images are copyrighted to Bethesda but can be used in a project under Fair Use clauses.

Yes, you are right that it's not a good idea because it would be pointless. However, you missed my point: you CAN do it because it's ALLOWED. I did make it clear that it shouldn't be done but NOT because of any restrictive license but because this wiki would be useless if it just consisted of copied content.

At least I understand the legal aspects of this, and that's what I was trying to put across here. Obviously people decided to take a fit instead. >_> We use to take info and images from UESP in the past. We stopped doing it for a bunch of reasons, and our admin Kacj321 was even demoted for copy and pasting entire articles directly from UESP, which is considered plaigirism.

Now understanding UESP's copyright law requires some explaining. Their Arena and Daggerfall images are completely free to use, due to considering Daggerfall's limitations if you'd take a picture of a certain thing you'd always get the same exact thing no matter what. Every NPC would look the same everytime. Later titles differ however, as the 3D aspect was introduced and sprites were retired. This brought upon different angles and so on, so you'd almost always get a different picture when you took a picture of something. NPCs would look different depending on what angle you took. There are the rare occurences where images aren't copyrighted.

Every image on UESP has a license on it's info pages. Some images are taken from websites and videos, and those images have a certain license. Other images are given the UESP copyright license because given how they're taken it would be extremely hard to replicate it and take the exact same screenshot, which appears on games that aren't from Daggerfall/Redguard or such. UESP gives permission to use and publish these photos, but the only requirement is to give them credit.

But UESP's images different from ours. They are often square, ours are often vertical for characters or horizontal for areas. Ours tend to show the whole thing, UESP often only cares about keeping it small and square. There are some exceptions though, i.e. the Ash Hopper Meat photos. UESP uses and copyrights it under their own law, and our wiki uses. This should not be copyrighted as they are taken at virtually the exact same default angle that the item is regularly at when looked at through the inventory. If images like this are what you are talking about using on the wiki, then by all means I support what you're trying to say, but for only images that are from older games or fits the same king of category as the Ash Hopper Meat photos. If you mean every image, well then by opinion is sort of based on what I said above.