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; images may or may not be under this license -- you'll have to check each image individually. This is part of our All The Tropes: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. 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)

When you add an image, you should look for an image that has a free license, like Creative Commons or GFDL. But if you can't find one, that's okay -- under the United States' fair use law (U.S.C. § 107), we can use some images to represent a work, so long as we're not providing a big enough portion of the original content that it could be affect the profits of the original work. Just make sure to mark the image as fair use. See Wikipedia's fair use page for more details on how the law works, if you need to know.

Quotes from copyrighted works can be used under the same Fair Use logic, 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."

Can I just copy over stuff from TV Tropes?
Nope. 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. (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.

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.

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?