Copyright problem edit

Regarding your edit at Dean Forest Railway, I already told you that you can't copy and paste unfree copyrighted material (such as text from most websites) to Wikipedia. In particular, your contribution has been taken from the Dean Forest Railway website, which contains the following copyright notice at the bottom: "© Copyright 2002-2008 Dean Forest Railway - All Rights Reserved". (Unless whoever owns copyright to the content agrees to release it under the GFDL license, its inclusion on Wikipedia would violate the copyright laws and Wikipedia policies. Users who persistently violate copyright may be blocked from editing.) Also note that in most of the world, a copyright notice is not necessary for the work to be protected by copyright - even if a page doesn't have one, you can't assume it is in public domain.

On the other hand, it is the text that is protected by copyright, not the facts. That means that a you can use an outside page as a source of information, as long as you credit the original source and - most importantly - state the facts using your own words. (It is NOT sufficient to add the text to Wikipedia with the sentences slightly rephrased.)

Regards, Mike Rosoft (talk) 15:53, 9 October 2008 (UTC)Reply