All The Tropes:Content Usage Guidelines

This is a draft of a page under consideration for usage as human-readable content usage guidelines.
Welcome to TV Tropes! This page is designed to help you understand what can happen with your ideas and words when you add them to one of our pages.

We use a license called the "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike" (often abbreviated as the "CC BY-SA" or just "BY-SA"), which allows other people to freely use the words and other content on TV Tropes in their own work, with a few conditions. When you edit a page on the wiki, you are allowing TV Tropes to use your words under the license. Hopefully we can explain what that means in a way that's easy to understand.

Anyone is allowed to use the words and other content (including any you add!) on TV Tropes for any purpose as long as they:
 * properly credit the source of the content (often by linking to the page by its URL)
 * share the new work under the same license ? allowing you to take any improvements or changes they've made, and use them for your own work
 * don't restrict the ability of others to share the content (meaning no DRM!)

Anyone making a new work is allowed to sell their creation, but they must allow anyone who has access to their creation to copy and reuse it, exactly as they copied and reused the words and ideas from TV Tropes. This sort of process allows free use and copying, but not letting anyone 'steal' the content for purely their own, selfish purposes. It's mutual sharing, and everyone learned how to do that in grade school ? so sad that our culture has largely forgotten how!

Bear in mind that not everything added to TV Tropes is covered by this free-sharing license. Page images and quotations are (for the most part) not allowed to be used exactly like this, because someone else owns the rights to them ? such as a page image of Donald Duck is owned by Disney. Those are only used here under a very complex set of conditions called "fair use", which lets us use them to illustrate the idea of tropes by a picture and quotes. You can add page images and quotations, of course, but just be sure that they're good at showing what the trope is about ? the better they are at that, the better it is for everyone!

There are two further things to keep in mind. First, the concept of these tropes is not owned by anyone ? only how we describe them is. Many of these tropes have been around for years (if not decades or millennia!), and we're just cataloguing them ? not creating them. Second, the titles of tropes are also not owned by anyone ? titles are never copyrighted, and no one has a trademark on these names. What this means is anyone is free to use and incorporate those trope names and concepts into their own work, in any way they wish.

To summarise, anyone is allowed to use the wiki's content in ways very similarly to how we're using it right here, on this very wiki.

Proper uses:

 * A troper writes a book of tropes, based on the Tropes of Legend, providing a URL to every legendary trope in the footnotes of their respective sections. They charge $10 for the printed book (making a small profit on each book), but allow anyone who has a copy to freely create more copies or use their edited descriptions back in the TV Tropes wiki.
 * A gaming corporation finds TV Tropes and sees the potential for a guide to writing plots and creating worlds. They write a sourcebook incorporating the ideas and concepts of our tropes, to help Dungeon Masters design a convincing world for their players' enjoyment. They provide, in an appendix, links to every article they incorporated, and release the book on their website, free of cost and under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. (It, of course, becomes a smash hit, used by dungeon masters for generations to come.)
 * A Nerd Core band sees a self-demonstrating article that has a strangely lyrical quality to its words. They set it to music, and release it on a CD along with other tracks. They provide a link to the article in the accompanying booklet, and allow that track to be freely shared or reused. The rest of the CD isn't, but just that one track spurs their CD to chart-shattering (well, as chart-shattering as Nerd Core can get) success!
 * An author, who is also an avid TV Tropes reader, consciously uses tropes in their writings, referring to them in her writing notes by name. Their books are released under the usual "All rights reserved." copyright for novels.
 * Another wiki, focusing on a specific anime series, uses our base of tropes to catalogue their own favoured series. Their work is not directly copied from TV Tropes, and they only use the titles and concepts, writing entirely new descriptions. They release this online under a license that doesn't allow commercial uses.

Improper uses:

 * Another wiki copies some pages that describe works, and provides a link to the original in their page history. This is all okay ? but they say it cannot be used for commercial purposes. This ignores the intent of the license we've used, and they are not allowed to use our work like this.
 * A famous author uses some words directly from one of our articles, but doesn't even acknowledge that we wrote them! This is both Plagiarism, and not following the conditions they would have been allowed to use the words under.
 * A corporation takes some of our trope pages and compiles them into a short ebook on storytelling devices. They credit us properly, and say they're releasing the book under the Creative Commons license we're already using. In the end, they release this through a major online bookstore, following what they already said ? the credit is there, and the license is correct. However, there's a problem ? no one can copy the book. They slipped some DRM onto the release, which doesn't properly allow those who purchased the book to share or reuse the content.