Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-27794543-20180711230348/@comment-27794543-20180719040603

IANAL, but as far as standard gifs (those produced from stills or video clips without any transformativeness) the copyright is completely owned by the CW, Warner Bros, & CBS. (I'm going by United States copyright laws since this is a US TV series and Wikia is a US business.)

It's fine to create a policy that we want to play nice with other fans and remove gifs they made but were uploaded to the wiki without permission. However, they can not make "copyright claims" to something that does not belong to them (unless "they" are the CW, Warner Bros, and/or CBS, in which case this wiki has a huge problem).

By that I mean this wikia's policy should not in any way indicate that creating a gif (without transformativeness) transfers copyright to the fan, because then this wiki will be crossing the line from fair use into endorsing copyright infringement of the CW, Warner Bros, & CBS's property, which is not a line that Wikia wants to cross.

I know there's fans who disagree with this and believe they have ownership of the gifs, but to be honest, I don't buy it because that's not how copyright in the United States works.