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>Organization > LegalStatus: This document was announced publicly on 4 March 2009. Please send any comments to site-policy@w3.org by 18 March 2009.
This document provides use cases for the W3C® Excerpt & Citation License text and explains how to use it.
The goal of the license is to make it easy for people implementing W3C specifications to include portions of the specifications in help text and other software documentation. The license does not permit the creation of derivative specifications. Thus, in scope use cases include the following:
The above are only examples and the Excerpt license is not limited to them.
The Excerpt License does not allow people to create new specifications, including forking a specification:
Part of the license relates to formatting and visual presentation of information; those provisions were included to help avoid confusion about the status of excerpted materials.
If you have any questions about your use cases, please send them to site-policy@w3.org. Some use cases are likely to be "edge cases," such as software frameworks, where W3C specifications are used in a context that itself needs further specifications for software implementations within the framework. Those cases are on the edge between subsetting/supersetting of W3C Recommendations and simple How-to's that would explain how to implement the W3C Recommendation correctly within the framework.
The W3C Excerpt & Citation License applies automatically to all W3C Documents that carry the W3C Document license. But it is a distinct license. By copying the full text or by implementing a W3C Document, the W3C Document license is used implicitly. If parts of W3C Documents are used and reproduced, the W3C Excerpt & Citation License is automatically applied to such behavior with all the use limitations that it contains.
UNDER BOTH MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE LICENSES, THIS DOCUMENT AND ALL DOCUMENTS, TESTS AND SOFTWARE THAT LINK THIS STATEMENT ARE PROVIDED "AS IS," AND COPYRIGHT HOLDERS MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR TITLE; THAT THE CONTENTS OF THE DOCUMENT ARE SUITABLE FOR ANY PURPOSE; NOR THAT THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SUCH CONTENTS WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY PATENTS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADEMARKS OR OTHER RIGHTS.
COPYRIGHT HOLDERS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF ANY USE OF THE DOCUMENT OR THE PERFORMANCE OR IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CONTENTS THEREOF.