Forum:About adding post 2012 works

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Alright, I'm a refugee from TV Tropes that's tired of their nonsense and wishes to help out here. I have a question about work pages past June 2012. I know we can't copy and paste them here unless we made them originally, and writing different descriptions for them can work, but what about tropes related to the work? Suppose I made a page for Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and I describe it's use of the Hailfire Peaks trope. Even if I word it differently, would mentioning a trope that's also on the other site be considered infringement? -- Krazy Kopter (talk) 20:52 5 April 2014 (UTC)


That was the first question I had was I was beleaguered about my English despite having a degree in the subject, and I worked on some pages as well. There have some tropes, like paying last disrespects and punished for sympathy. They didn’t like the tropes I had created on “You know, that trope where.” They haven’t left the Workshop because there’s still work to be done. Maybe, you can find folks here like Vorticity or GethN7, they could help.--Beta Log 86 (talk) 03:21, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

  • At which school did you get your degree? -V
    • At a Liberal Arts University in New England, can't reveal the exact one due to privacy concerns. --Beta Log 86 (talk) 19:32, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Krazy Kopter, as long as you don't do an obvious copy-paste, writing something in your own words is fine. Even if you describe something in a similar style as what is on TVT, that's fine, just as long as you didn't just copy-paste text from there (if you wrote it there first, you can use that, since it's your own contributions, as long as you don't copy anyone else's work). And no, it's not infringement to mention a trope seen on the other site. Also, we have the Hailfire Peaks trope too. GethN7 (talk) 03:40, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I'm going to go ahead and say that is not an example of infringing content by taking the list of tropes from TV Tropes, but this comes with a serious IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) warning. What follows hereafter is not legal advice; should feel you are at legal risk, please consult a qualified attorney. Under my own opinion, the list of tropes itself is not copyrightable, because the tropes themselves represent ideas, information, and raw data. Thus, they are outside the scope of copyright law. The presentation of the information (i.e. descriptions) however are most likely subject to copyright, and should be rewritten for our site. See wikipedia:Copyright#Scope for more on that. But at this time I see no reason to object to bare lists of tropes coming from TV Tropes (well, other than examples needing context). Hope that clears up the issue for you. Vorticity (talk) 03:55, 6 April 2014 (UTC)


Oops... I forgot to mention paying last disrespects and punished for sympathy were created sometime after June 2012... so there can an issue since there's no telling who wrote what.--Beta Log 86 (talk) 03:57, 6 April 2014 (UTC)