Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Copyright
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Problem
An article is using copyrighted content without permission.
Solution
Wikipedia is a wiki, so you can remove the content yourself!
- Follow the instructions on our copyright problems page
Are you the copyright owner?
- If you are the copyright owner or represent the copyright owner, we can assist you best via e-mail. You may contact us at info-en-c@wikimedia.org with an informal request. Please cite the exact URL (the "address" or "Location" of the page as shown by your web browser, as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), and provide enough information to substantiate your claim of copyright ownership.
Correspondence is answered by a small team of volunteers.
- This address is not for requesting permission to copy content from Wikipedia. If you have such a request, please see the relevant entry.
- If you prefer to use the slower process of a formal OCILLA request, you can send it to our designated agent.
Important notes
Facts cannot be copyrighted, only their expression. That is, you cannot claim a Wikipedia article infringes your copyright just because it happens to cite the same facts as a text or page that you wrote; you may only claim if the text in the article was copied from your work without permission.
Some people contend that, since they own a trademark, they ought to be able to authorize or prohibit any publication mentioning that trademark, for instance, publications describing the products covered by this trademark. This is false - if it were true, there would be no free press!
Copyright is defined by national and international laws. It is not a matter of ethics. Plagiarism is a different, wider, and less precisely defined issue.
This is a contact page for the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts sites such as wikipedia.org, wikisource.org, and wikimedia.org. The Wikimedia Foundation does not host answers.com, nor does it host the millions of sites to which Wikipedia may have links. If you have issues with these sites, we suggest you contact those who host or edit them.
