 Copyright is a very complex thing to navigate, and the SCP Wiki has something called a Creative Commons 3.0 share-alike attribution license. But I've talked to authors before. People who have been posting 20-30 articles on the Wiki who really have no idea what that means, so I'm going to talk to you about that now. Now it can be easy to misunderstand what exactly a Creative Commons license means. A lot of people think that it means you can't make money off of SCP content, or that you can't steal SCP content, or that you can't do this, or you can't do that, but the real point of a Creative Commons license is mainly in that it allows people to do almost anything they'd like with it, as long as they follow a certain set of instructions that are included with the license itself. See, a Creative Commons license is basically used saying that you're releasing your work to be used by others under a set of specific conditions. And a Creative Commons license doesn't mean you don't still own your work. It just means that other people can reproduce it as much as they'd like, as long as they follow the conditions you set out in the first place. The SCP Wiki uses something called a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution share-alike license, as I mentioned earlier. There are actually four possible elements to a Creative Commons license, and first I'm going to describe briefly the two that don't apply to SCP Wiki Works, because one of them, at least, is often considered to apply when it doesn't. That's the non-commercial element. Non-commercial would mean that you're not allowed to use the content in anything that makes money. It's a bit more complex than that, but that's the basic way of describing it. Now, there's also a no-derivatives element, which can be applied on certain works that you may find on the internet, but not on anything you find on the Wiki. And it would mean that you couldn't change it. You couldn't adapt the piece. You could reproduce the piece in its exact form, but you couldn't change it. You couldn't add to it. You couldn't fiddle with it. That's the best way to put it. But neither of those two apply. That's very important to understand. Not the non-commercial element and not a non-derivatives element. On the SCP Wiki, the only two elements of a Creative Commons license that apply are share-alike and attribution. Attribution means when someone reuses your work, they have to source the original. Now, it's core form that basically just means you need to add a link to the original work, and the original work will often contain information on the original creator. A lot of people might argue that you'd include the name of the author as well, although that's not necessary strictly. It can be argued that it is, so sometimes people would include it anyway. Like, in my, like, often times when I add credits for reading on my channel, I would include this article was written by Dr. Samarian on the SCP Wiki and can be found here with a link to the article. And I say Dr. Samarian because my username on the Wiki is, quote, is exactly Dr. The Full Word and Samarian, so you'd want to make sure it's exact. And essentially that's it. The Creative Commons license is very broad and very freeing. And finally, there's the share-alike element. The share-alike provision essentially tells you that when you create a derivative work, or if you just reproduce the work, it has to be shared under the same license. That means I can't create a reading of an SCP article and then say that the reading is copyrighted to me and only me. And that does mean technically that people can quote, unquote, steal it from me. But that's really not the right word. As long as they credit me properly, they can use the work in their own works. That's sort of the draw of the SCP Wiki in general. Allowing people to create derivative works based on stuff that's already posted has allowed the Wiki to grow exponentially in article count and in interest. And it's allowed a kind of a broad, as we always say, no-canon world where everyone can get involved at any point. They don't have to have been there from the beginning. Nobody owns the base concepts necessarily. It's owned by everyone. I used to be licensing staff and I used to get some of the same questions over and over again from established authors and from new authors and from people who aren't authors and wanted to create an SCP video game or any other types of derivative SCP content. The Creative Commons 3.0 share-alike attribution license means that as long as you share the work that you've created under the same license that is a CC 3.0 share-alike attribution license you have to share the derivative work under the exact same license and you give a proper attribution to the original author and the original work. You're clear. You can do whatever you want with it. You can sell it. You can give it away for free. You can create derivative works of art. You can create derivative works of writing. You could take an SCP article off the wiki if you really wanted to and you could turn it into something else. A game. A movie. Anything. But the important thing is that you'd have to share it again under the same license and you will hear the phrase, you can't make money off of SCP content. And people take that to mean that you aren't allowed to make money off of SCP content and that's not actually accurate. What it really means is that it's very difficult for anyone to make money off of SCP content on a large scale. No one's going to invest $150 million in an SCP horror movie, much less $150,000 in an SCP horror movie if they know that the resultant work has to be released under a Creative Commons share-alike attribution license because that means that someone could take the movie and redistribute it for free as long as they follow the content license. Now there are smaller points to make about the Creative Commons license in as much as they apply to stuff you put up on the wiki itself. Now I helped craft the images policy that we have currently and part of that requires you to include a link to your attribution even if it's public domain. And public domain works don't actually legally require any kind of attribution. You can use a public domain work in anything you want to create without saying who created it originally. It's usually pretty good form to say I got this from this because plagiarism is still a thing even if it's not a licensing issue. But generally as long as you're not claiming to have created the idea wholesale yourself you're not going to get any kind of moral gray areas. But if you're putting up an article on the SCP wiki the SCP wiki has to prove that the image that you're using or the text that you're using is public domain and if they can't then they have to assume that it's not. They can't spend you know every hour of every day going out looking for your images. That's why you the person who found the image in the first place and who can most easily give them a source for it are the one who has to find it. And that's also another thing. You can't take a public domain work and then re-license it as Creative Commons 3.0. You can't take a Creative Commons 4.0 work and re-license it as 3.0. You can take a one and two but not a four. Four is not backwards compatible. That doesn't mean you can't use a Creative Commons 4.0 image in a 3.0 work but you have to make the distinction because if you look at the bottom of every page it says unless otherwise stated this work is under a Creative Commons 3.0 blah blah blah. The important part is that you state if a work included in it is not actually under it can still be used in the work which make that point. But it needs to be clearly stated that it's not a 3.0 work. Now there is some argument to be made that say if you use a public domain work that your changing of it has created essentially a new work from the original and that it could be licensed under a new license but it's generally good practice to just say that the work that you've included is separately licensed from the original. And this is important especially if you get say permission from someone to use a fully copyrighted work in your SCP which you can do if you get permission from the original creator. And while that permission isn't technically revocable you need to be careful about it because if somebody says they don't want you to use their work in your article anymore you should probably take it out. Just as a good policy and to avoid the fact that most of these kinds of things are decided in court and unless you can afford a lawyer and a court trip and the day off of work that it's going to take for you to go to court every time you need to deal with this problem probably avoid the issue entirely if you possibly can. Also it's just good for not being a dick. Anyway that's it. If you'd like to see more content like this join my Patreon at patreon.com forward slash decimary and the link will be in the description down below like these people have to help support this content. And finally thank you very much for watching.