All The Tropes:Copyrights

All The Tropes uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC-BY-SA). All text on the site is licensed under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted. Small excerpts of copyrighted works may be used to represent the work in question, such as quotes from novels; these excerpts remain the copyright of their respective owners.

Images may or may not be under the CC-BY-SA license -- you'll have to check each image's metadata page individually. Because we cover the media, much of what we are fair use images to represent the copyrighted works in question, and remain the property of their respective owners.

This page is part of our Terms of Service.

What you can do with All The Tropes content
In general, you can copy any text on the website, and use it for any purpose, so long as that part of the text uses a CC-BY-SA license. The Creative Commons website has more details on what you can and can't do.

What can I add to All The Tropes?
Anything you write, of course. With the notable exception of content you first contributed to TV Tropes -- they claim full ownership of anything written there, with or without your knowledge and consent.

You can also add any content that has the same license, CC-BY-SA, or a compatible license: This includes Wikipedia pages, though we encourage coming up with content from a trope point of view, rather than just blindly copying The Other Wiki. Make sure you remember the "By" part of the license -- always attribute your source, in the page text or in the edit comment.
 * Public Domain
 * CC-Zero
 * CC-By
 * CC-By-SA
 * GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 (sometimes, see here for details)
 * Excepts of works under fair use (see below)

Quotes from copyrighted works can be used under the under the United States' fair use law (U.S.C. § 107), so long as they're not trying to reproduce some huge chunk of the original work. Just don't quote a whole scene or something, or what we'd "have here is a failure to communicate." See Wikipedia's fair use page for more details on how the law works, if you need to know.

What images can I add to All The Tropes?
When you add an image, you should look for an image that has a free license, like any Creative Commons or GFDL. Anything on the list above, plus CC-By-NC-SA, are preferred. Note that anything without a specified copyright is still under a copyright due to the Berne Convention.

But if you can't find a libre image, that's okay -- under the U.S. fair use law, ATT can use images to represent a work, so long as we're not providing a big enough portion of the original content that it could affect the profits of the original work. This is a necessary part of representing works in media, the vast majority of which are sold for profit. Remember, media companies often distribute publicity images that are meant to be shared for informative purposes.

In any case, you should always add the license for the work. Each image has a corresponding page in the "File:" namespace to store the metadata for the image. On this page, you should select the best template for the license, or otherwise describe our right to have it on our website. If the image does not have a free license, make sure to mark the image as fair use.

Can I just copy over stuff from TV Tropes?
No. Not even if you wrote it yourself. TV Tropes claims full ownership of all content you post there, and expressly do not allow you to sublicense the text in question.

They used to have a CC-BY-SA license, but they changed to a more restrictive license in July 2012. Since the change in license was done without the permission of some editors, it is unclear if they even have permission to distribute a large portion of their current content. We don't want to get involved in distributing content with such questionable copyright status.

However, you can add TVT content if it was created before July 2012, but more than likely, this site already has all of those pages.

We might have lost some stuff in Main/, but you'd have to use a June 2012 version or earlier -- check archive.org. (If you're interested in the foreign language page, we do have that data, but it's not imported. Message an admin if you're interested in doing a site in another language.  Mediawiki is much better for that purpose.)

I want to reuse something from All The Tropes
Great! You have to keep any derivative work under a CC-BY-SA license, or a least the portion of the work that you derived from this website. And then, you can cite either the original editor(s) who wrote the content, or All The Tropes. We'd like it if you also include a link back to our website, allthetropes.org, but that's optional. That's all.

You can sell it, do anything you want with it -- but anyone else can come along and make an even better work based on yours. Well, we hope it's better. If you're reusing images, be sure to check them individually, because they may be copyrighted content used under fair use. This is not legal advice, so use your best judgement.

For any content you write, you may reuse it for any purpose whatsoever. All The Tropes disclaims any ownership of user-submitted content, and distributes only licensed content.

Can I copy something from this site to TV Tropes?
No, you cannot. They use a Creative Commons license with a Non-Commercial clause added, and so the two licenses are completely incompatible. Distributing CC-BY-SA content as CC-BY-NC-SA content is copyright infringement, unless the permission of all previous editors was given for that page. You can feel free to ask those editors, though.

However, anything that you write on this website may be copied over to TV Tropes afterwards. You lose ownership of your writing to TV Tropes in so doing, but your original CC-BY-SA license stays in effect, and cannot be revoked by TV Tropes.

Hey, you infringed my (or my boss') copyright!
If you have a complaint that one of our users submitted copyrighted matter, send an email to brent@allthetropes.org, and we'll try to respond as quickly as possible. This is where Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests go, too.

Hey, I don't want you talking about my work that way!
Oh, hi there, creator (or owner). It's nice to have such an esteemed person on our site. Why don't you come and see our All The Tropes:FAQ for Creators?