Commons:First steps/License selection

First steps tour

Tips & tricks

Third parties

Reuse of Commons’ media files

How to select the right license

When you upload a file, you must apply a license statement for it.

Choosing your file's license is an important decision, as all content in Wikimedia Commons has to be licensed freely. It is therefore imperative to clarify your rights to upload it under a free license. The decision tree is a graphical overview of the issues below.

Decision tree on uploading images to Commons

Tips and tricks

Generally, if you're releasing your own content under a free license, you cannot revoke the permissions granted.
Some free licenses automatically cover various versions of the licensed content, because, under applicable copyright law, these versions would be considered the same work. For instance, you may wish to license thumbnail-quality files under a Creative Commons license while keeping raw, higher-resolution copies proprietary. However, when doing so, you should be warned that you might well be unintentionally licensing those other versions, because, in regard to copyright, the two could be considered the same work.

If you grant such a license for users to use a version of a work, the license may automatically give users the same rights to use any version that differs only in the level of some automatic conversion, regardless of the quality or resolution. While details of what would be considered the same work vary between jurisdictions, one key issue is whether or not enough creative expression is added in the conversion. See Commons:Same work for more details.

The easiest case of licensing are self-drawn images. Pictures taken by you are a little bit more problematic. If any of the identifiable people have a reasonable expectation of privacy, their permission is needed for publication. What constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy differs greatly from country to country. See COM:IDENT for more precise, detailed information on these differences.
Artwork permanently displayed in public is covered in several nations, including for example, Germany, Switzerland and Austria under Freedom of Panorama, while other nations like France and Italy have no such regulation. If Freedom of Panorama applies, you can upload your images of either artwork or buildings unimpeded. This is not allowed in nations like France and Italy; e.g., you cannot upload a picture of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome, Italy unless the palace is incidental to the photo as a whole.

In cases where the object in question was only temporarily installed in a public place, freedom of panorama might not apply. One famous example for this was the wrapped Reichstag by Christo in Berlin, Germany. You'll also have to obtain permission for objects in museums or shots on private property — indoor photographs especially strictly require the owner's consent.

Most images you'll find on the Internet can't be uploaded, unless the copyright owner explicitly allowed for publication under a free license. You might try asking for permission, however. If you obtained such a permission via email, please forward it to permissions@wikimedia.org and reference it at upload. It is advisable to attach a standard declaration of consent such as Commons:Email templates to your email asking for permission.
If a work's author died more than 70 years ago it is within the public domain in most nations and can be uploaded in almost all cases. This applies to third party reproductions as well, as these lack the required own creativity needed to put it under copyright (see for example the Bridgeman v. Corel case).

More detailed information on copyright and licensing as well as copyright laws in different countries can be found at Commons:Licensing.

Available licenses

Licensing jargon
Term	Meaning
License	A legal document outlining the permitted use (or lack thereof) of media. Only the copyright owner of media can apply a license to it.
CC	Creative Commons, an organization that has written free licenses for public use. These licenses are prefixed with CC.
Attribution	Giving credit to the author. In CC licenses, this is abbreviated with BY.
Share-alike	Licensing works derived from a copylefted source in a similar fashion, this is abbreviated with SA.
Copyleft	Allowing more permissive use than traditional copyright.
Fair use	A doctrine in which the public has a limited right to use copyrighted materials.

If the media you are uploading is your own work, you have a number of available licenses to choose from. If you are not concerned with your rights to the media and merely want to add a file quickly, choosing an option from the "Best practices" section is a great choice. If you want to weigh what permissions you give and what rights you obtain, study each license and decide based upon your criteria. Following are a basic outline of each license, organized by best and better options.

If there is no appropriate license to select, you can set "None" and manually insert the proper license later on (for a list of all allowed licenses see Commons:Copyright tags). This is a rather advanced way, however, as it requires you to know the exact license template's name.

"I don't know what the license is"

This isn't a valid option, but rather a test to verify that you know what you're doing. Files uploaded with this option checked will be deleted. In particular, Fair use and other non-free licenses (like grants for non-commercial usage) are not allowed at Wikimedia Commons.

Best practices

"Own work, attribution required, copyleft" ({{CC BY-SA 4.0}})

This selection requires that the author of the media be credited for the work and any derivative works to be licensed similarly. This is the recommended choice, as it makes using your media files very easy while still allowing you to keep some rights to the work.

"Own work, attribution required" ({{CC BY 4.0}})

Another multi-license, this option requires attribution and/or releasing derivative works under similar licenses.

"Own work, public domain" ({{CC0}})

With this choice, you grant everyone the permission to use your media for whatever purpose they see fit. People don't even have to credit you. Once within the public domain, your image cannot be relicensed later on. Other free licenses allow you to retain at least some of your rights.

These licenses were created by Creative Commons, who created a group of modular licenses which can be mixed in many variations. All published versions of the two licenses are accepted. As of 2015, the 4.0 version is the most recently released one; the 2.0 version is often used for uploads from Flickr since it is the only version available there. Files only available under licenses containing "Noncommercial" and/or "NoDerivatives" are unfree and therefore not accepted.

Wrapping up

Once you're done with these choices, it is a good idea to check "Watch this page" to keep track of any changes pertaining to your media. With your personal watchlist, you can see the tracked files' change dates, comments and the persons committing the change. You can find the watchlist in the user tabs atop any page.

Finally, once you click on "Upload file" it may be necessary to approve this action, as your software might consider this a security issue. After the upload is complete — which may take a while — you'll be redirected to that file's page.

If you uploaded the file for use in Wikipedia or another project that uses Wikimedia Commons as a file repository, you still need to edit the relevant page(s) in that other project in order to make your file show up there. Please refer to that project's help pages about media use for further instructions. The instructions for the English language Wikipedia can be found at Wikipedia:Picture tutorial.