API:Licensing

There are several aspects to the copyright of information you retrieve through an API.
 * The generated documentation for the API generally falls under the license of the code, for example GPL v2 and above.
 * MediaWiki action API modules help display a "License:" link that gives this license, for example Special:ApiHelp/query+textextracts shows a link to Special:Version/License/TextExtracts for the API module provided by the TextExtracts extension.


 * The content that you retrieve through the API in general has the same license as reported on the wiki from which you retrieved it. This license is displayed in the footer of pages, for example, 's content license is shown at the bottom of main namespace pages, it is MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyright and currently shows
 * You can programmatically determine this by querying for the  meta property of the wiki.
 * The content license may be different in different pages and areas
 * For example,on the [Domain Help Pages | public-domain help pages] such as Help:Images are deliberately licensed under a less restrictive license: "Contributions to the PD Help are released as public domain via the CC0 waiver." This makes it easier for content to be reused without any restriction.
 * Similarly, the facts on Wikidata are under a different license than other content, hence the footer on Wikidata pages is different. it displays "All structured data from the main and property namespace is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; text in the other namespaces is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply."
 * Similarly, the facts on Wikidata are under a different license than other content, hence the footer on Wikidata pages is different. it displays "All structured data from the main and property namespace is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; text in the other namespaces is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply."


 * In the case of multimedia files, the use to which the media is put affects the "fair use" defense of it. Presenting an image that contains another company's logo with the intent to make it appear that your service is being offered by that company may be a violation, even if the image is published with a liberal license.


 * Using the APIs you can also put new data on the server. Such edits fall under the Terms of Use of the server, just as if you made the edit as a human being. For example, on . the footer MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyright references the terms of use at Terms of use, requiring you for example to not cause harm to Wikimedia infrastructure.

rightsinfo query
This does not take into account different copyrights asserted in different namespaces, as described above.