Wikiquote:Copyrights

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This page is an official policy on Wikiquote.
It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow.
Big changes to this page should be talked about on the talk page before changing.

This page in a nutshell: Only add pages that you are sure are allowed under the terms of the GFDL.

Copyright means that after someone has written something, there are laws that say that other people can't make copies unless that person lets them.

You can copy very small parts of something as "fair use". For example, you can read a book and take very small parts of the book as quotes and put them on Simple English Wikiquote. Make sure that there are not too many quotes from any one copyrighted work.

If the author has been dead for 70 years, anyone can copy the book.

Don't copy a list of quotes from another website or from a book, unless it has a GFDL license (that tells how people can copy it) like Simple English Wikiquote. You can copy a very small part of the list. (Even if the author of the quotes has been dead for 70 years, the person who chose the quotes and made the list has a copyright for the list.) Always say where you found the quote.

English Wikiquote has a GFDL license. You can copy quotes, or even whole lists of quotes, from English Wikiquote and put them on Simple English Wikiquote.

Copyright is complex. You can ask at Wikiquote:Simple talk if you don't know what to do.