SpongeBob Wiki:Copyrights

Everything created by official parties for the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise are registered trademarks of Nickelodeon and its associates. With that said, the SpongeBob Wiki is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Nickelodeon. The SpongeBob Wiki offers no suggestion that the work presented on this website is "official" or produced or sanctioned by the owner of the aforementioned trademarks. The SpongeBob Wiki will take all steps necessary to ensure that any usage of trademarked items in no way confuses the audience of this site as to its origin. The SpongeBob Wiki makes no claim to own SpongeBob or any of the names related to it. Images that are displayed on this site are copyrighted to Nickelodeon (in the case of screen shots and similar pictures) or to the creator of the image (for fan-made artwork). Visitors may download any pictures displayed on this site for personal use as long as proper credit is given.

Article content
Anyone is free to use the text content of the SpongeBob Wiki in websites, articles, or other publications, provided you follow the guidelines of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-SA) license, which establishes the following requirements:


 * you must acknowledge the authorship of the original article, and
 * for any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

If you are simply duplicating a SpongeBob Wiki article, the second and third obligations can be fulfilled by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the SpongeBob Wiki article hosted on this website.

If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, you need to both acknowledge authorship and provide access to the original copy of the text.

Important: The content of this website does not apply to the original works and trademarked names! The SpongeBob titles and associated names are the sole property of Nickelodeon. The administrators of the SpongeBob Wiki believe that the operation of this website falls under the definition of "fair use" under United States copyright laws.

Literatures, images, and other media
Images that are displayed on the SpongeBob Wiki remain the property of their original creators, and are only included on this website for purposes of illustration under fair use guidelines. Unless the original author of the image expressly grants permission, images do not fall under the scope of the Creative Commons license. In all cases, the images must be uploaded to our database, accompanied by a specific note with:
 * credit for the original author of the image or other media file (if the file is a fan-created work) including a link where the original author may be contacted, or
 * the original source of the image or other media file (if the file is derived from an official SpongeBob work, e.g. screen shots and sound bytes).

You must also include information about:
 * whether the file is uploaded to the SpongeBob Wiki with express permission of the author, or under fair use rules, and
 * the source of the file, being a specific video game, episode, book, other official work, a website, or any other medium.

Copyrighted works
If you use part of a copyrighted work under "fair use," or if you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of our license, you must make a note of that fact (along with names and dates). It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of the SpongeBob Wiki's material as possible (within the limits of copyright law), so original images and sound files licensed under the Creative Commons license or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use. Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt the project. If in doubt, write it yourself.

Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is perfectly legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate it in your own words, and submit it to the SpongeBob Wiki.

Public domain
Public domain comprises of copyright-free works and is intended to give incentive for people to create original works. Thus, a person could create a sculpture or write a novel and expect to be able to control that work for a certain amount of time. The creator can publish the work, copy it, and authorize copies and so on at his or her discretion. Alternately, they can deny permission to make copies for any reason. After a certain amount of time, the copyright and the work becomes available to the general public. In addition, the copyright owner can sell or give the right to copy to anyone, and they can even state "this work is now in the public domain".

Scanned images
Images are one of the most abused mediums on the Internet. It's common and actually widely accepted for people to scan in an image, then put them on their web site, send them in emails and post them to newsgroups at will. "Common" and "accepted" does not translate to legal.

An example can be illustrated in such way:

If you take a photo of Stephen Hillenburg from a magazine and scan it, then add it onto your website, you are violating copyright. If you take that same picture and run it through a filter and then post it on your website, you are still violating copyright. If you take that same picture and modify it heavily, say photo-manipulate Stephen Hillenburg into superwoman, you are still violating copyright. If you take that original scanned image then use your graphics program to heavily modify it into something else, say a fractal image, you are still violating copyright, at least technically, although it would be difficult to enforce. If you make a thumbnail of the Stephen Hillenburg picture and put that on your website with a reference to the original, then you may be allowed to do so under "fair use". If you link to a legal copy of Stephen Hillenburg's picture on the internet using, you are not violating copyright. If you link to a legal copy of Stephen Hillenburg's picture on the internet using, you are violating copyright and also bandwidth theft. If you are doing anything significant with the photo, it is generally wise to get a model release signed by the subject(s) in the photo.

Linking to copyrighted works
The general rule is, if it's on the Internet, you can link to it. It's considered good form to only link to web pages (TEXT, HTML or HTML-like objects). It's considered bad form to link directly to images, sounds, zip files, and so on using  without permission. It is a copyright violation to link using. This includes linking to pictures on other people's websites from message boards and forums.

Copyright infringement
It is not the job of rank-and-file members of the SpongeBob Wiki to police every article for possible copyright infringement, but if you suspect one, you should at the very least bring up the issue in that page's comments section. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed. The most helpful piece of information you can provide is a URL or other reference to what you believe may be the source of the text.

The SpongeBob Wiki requests that in the case that the owner or owners of a copyrighted work feel that their work is being illegally infringed upon, they provide a full list of all items which they believe are infringing, along with the reasoning behind the belief that those items are infringing to the site host or an administrator. In addition, please provide the name of a person, along with their mailing address and e-mail address if possible, for a reply or follow-up letters.