All The Tropes:List of Image License Templates

You may have been sent here by a mod, reminding you that there is a legal requirement for all images to have their license terms specified. Or you may have noticed an image that doesn't have a license but should.

Adding the license to an image is easy: just edit the file description page and copy in the appropriate image license template. If you want to be fancy, put the header  on the line immediately above the license template

Here's the list of image license templates.

Fair use
This is the "license" that is used for any image that is used in a way that qualifies as fair use under US law. Screen captures, card or magazine scans, images of text that's still under copyright - if somebody owns the copyright to the image, then use one of these.

If the copyright holder gave permission without giving All The Tropes a free license:
 * Permission

If the copyright holder gave permission and gave All The Tropes a free license, then skip down to "Creative Commons" and "Other Free Licenses", and use the matching license from those sections.

Otherwise:
 * Fairuse -- this is the most common license template on the wiki

Own image
You made the image yourself. Taking some "fair use" images and making a collage of them (or a demotivator, or a meme poster, or anything else) doesn't fall under this license; that's still "fair use". This is for things you drew, photographed, or painted yourself, or created in Blender, Daz Studio, Poser or similar software using only your own resources and resources that are licensed for royalty-free use in images.


 * Self
 * plus the license that you want to release your image under (see below)

Wikimedia
You got the image from Wikipedia or one of the other Wikimedia projects. (Note that you don't need to upload an image that you found on Wikimedia Commons - you can use it as if you had already uploaded it.)

If it's a copyrighted file:
 * From Wikimedia fairuse

Otherwise:
 * From Wikimedia
 * plus the license that Wikimedia says they use the image under (see below)

Public Domain
This is the one that we like the best, but is also the easiest to get wrong. This is the "license" used when there's no need to use a license because the image has either fallen into the public domain or been placed into the public domain by its creator.

Please read all of Wikipedia's page about public domain before you use this.


 * PD

Creative Commons
If you use one of these for an existing image, it must match the CC license that is published with the image. (If there isn't a CC license published with the image, then don't use these at all - unless you made the image yourself, as discussed above.)

Assemble the license using the abbreviations:
 * "CC" means Creative Commons, and always comes first.
 * "BY" means Attribution. Please make sure you list who made the image! (The page you downloaded it from should say; if it doesn't, then cite the page that you downloaded the image from. If you made the image yourself, please tell us how you want to be credited.)
 * "SA" means "Share Alike" - if it's in the license that you're reading, the entire license must be the same as the license that you're reading.
 * "NC" means NonCommercial.
 * "ND" means "No Derivatives" - you are not allowed to change the image, not even as much as cropping or re-sizing it, or use it as part of another image. Needless to say, we aren't fond of ND here.
 * Finally, the version number of the license. We don't have separate templates for all license versions, but we do have a large number of them.

Putting those elements together gives these templates. They're case-sensitive - sorry about them not being consistent, but that's what happens when multiple people create license templates.
 * cc-by-1.0
 * cc-by-2.5
 * CC-BY - for any version of BY that isn't listed above
 * Cc-by-sa-1.0
 * Cc-by-sa-2.0
 * Cc-by-sa-2.5
 * Cc-by-sa-3.0
 * CC-BY-SA 4.0
 * CC-BY-SA - for any version of BY-SA that isn't listed above
 * CC-BY-NC-2.5
 * CC-BY-NC-3.0
 * CC-BY-NC-SA-2.5
 * CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
 * CC-BY-NC-SA - for any version of BY-NC-SA that isn't listed above
 * CC-BY-NC-ND

One special CC license is CC0, which in most countries is functionally equivalent to Public Domain. (It is not legally exactly the same as Public Domain, so don't use one where you should use the other.)

Just like the public domain license, please read all of Wikipedia's page about public domain before you use this.


 * Cc-zero

Other Free Licenses
The licenses listed above cover over 90% of the cases that most people will discover... but not 100% of the cases.

Two GNU licenses have license templates here:
 * LGPL - the GNU Lesser General Public License
 * GFDL - the GNU Free Documentation License

Anything else needs to be described in the description text:
 * Other free
 * and then write out the license terms