Copyrights on Wikis

[KidIcarus]

Suppose I personally own the rights to a copyright image. If I were to upload the image onto a wiki that uses a looser form of copyright, would the copyright on the image be degraded to that of the wiki?

If it makes any difference, the wiki uses the following copyright policy: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

[SuperHamster]

It depends on what the wiki's policies are regarding copyrights, namely whether or not the wiki's licensing covers both their text and images. You'll have to read what the wiki in question says about their copyright policy.

Most wikis automatically release their contributors' text contributions under a specific license, but allow their users to license their own images with a license chosen from a list of available options (for instance, some wikis allow editors to retain all copyrights, while others, such as Wikipedia, require editors to only upload images that they release under specific free licenses). You'll just have to read what the wiki in question says about their copyright policy and see whether your images must be released under the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, or if they allow you to release your images under a license that you desire.

[tacopill]

Wikipedia (and other wikis) also provide the option of releasing the image into the public domain (or closest equivalent in respective nations, where "public domain" is non-existent).

This way, other people are free to edit the image in ways they feel are better, improving the wiki in the long run.

[Archaic]

In many cases, the wikis should have a tagging option for images which allows you to specify how it is that the wiki is allowed to use the image. If they don't currently have something for "copyrighted image uploaded by and used with the permission of the copyright holder", then suggest they add it.

[KidIcarus]

thanks guys