storiesFree to use

The LICENSE file at the root of this repository splits into parts, and a reuser needs to know which part they are holding.

The records in `data/` and the pages built from them: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, CC BY 4.0. That covers the text of every node, the `against[]` claims, the `dating` blocks, the kin sentences and the long reads including this one.

The code in `tools/`: MIT, copyright 2026 NaN. Permission to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and sell, with the notice kept and no warranty given.

The pictures in `data/images/**` and `docs/images/**`: each one carries its own licence, in its own record and on the page that shows it — CC0, public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA, the Free Art Licence, or a "no known copyright restrictions" rights statement from the holding institution. The LICENSE says plainly that none of them is relicensed by this repository. A CC BY-SA photograph here is still CC BY-SA when you take it, and the CC BY 4.0 on the records does not convert it.

The drawn signs — the glyphs in `tools/viz.py`, and the figure, house, car and boat on /wear/ — were drawn for this project from published descriptions rather than traced from any one object or anybody else's drawing, and they go out CC BY 4.0 with the records.

Quoted text is the fourth case and is not licensed at all. Every quotation on this site is short, in quotation marks, and attributed to a named speaker or publication, as fair dealing or fair use. Nothing here reproduces a copyrighted work at length, and a reuser taking a record takes the quotations under the same doctrine, not under CC BY.

The allowlist is in code and it is short.

`tools/harvest_commons.py` tests every candidate file against one expression: CC0, public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA, or the Free Art Licence. Anything else is listed on screen with its licence and skipped, so a rejected file is visible rather than silently missing. The file's own comment states the position on share-alike: it is complied with, not avoided — the licence and the author ride with the image into the record and onto the page.

`tools/validate.py` runs the same test from the other end, refusing any record whose `images[]` entry carries a licence outside the list. It accepts three institutional statements as well: "No known copyright restrictions", NoC-US, and United States Government Work. The comment beside that line says why and sets a limit — the first of those is the Flickr Commons and Library of Congress statement, meaning the holding institution found no copyright and asks only for a credit, and it is accepted here only where an item carries it on its own page, per item and never per collection.

What the pipeline will not take is anything non-commercial-only, anything no-derivatives, and anything held under fair use. On that last point this project follows Wikimedia Commons, which states that it "does not accept fair use justifications". Commons accepts only free content — "images and other media files that are not subject to copyright restrictions which would prevent them being used by anyone, anytime, for any purpose" — and requires that republication, derivative work and commercial use all be allowed, under a licence that is perpetual and non-revocable.

As this record is written, `images[]` is empty on every node in the atlas and candidate Commons filenames sit in `x_commons_files` waiting for that harvest. The rules above therefore describe a pass that has not yet run.

Two outside bodies of work do heavy lifting here and neither charges for it.

The country outlines in `data/geo/world.json` are Natural Earth, 1:110m. Its terms of use are among the shortest in cartography: "All versions of Natural Earth raster + vector map data found on this website are in the public domain." And then, remarkably: "No permission is needed to use Natural Earth. Crediting the authors is unnecessary." The site offers a suggested credit line — "Made with Natural Earth" — for anybody who wants to give one, and notes that the authors take no responsibility for accuracy or for how the data is used. This atlas credits it in the LICENSE anyway, because a reader tracing a border deserves to know whose sheet it came off.

Wikimedia Commons is where the atlas's pictures will come from, and its licensing policy is the reason a picture pipeline can exist at all: a repository of files vetted in advance against a single free-content test, with licence, author and page URL published for each. Inference — the practical value is that a small project can assemble an illustrated reference without negotiating a single permission, and the price is that the project has to carry the share-alike obligations forward rather than quietly dropping them.

CC BY 4.0, in the deed's own words, lets you "Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially" and "Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially". The licensor cannot revoke those freedoms while you follow the terms.

Two terms. "Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made." And "No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits."

In practice, for this atlas: name it as the Amulet Atlas, link to the CC BY 4.0 deed, and say if you changed anything. Take the text from the record, the JSON from the API tables under `build/api/` — `nodes.json`, `timeline.json`, `against.json`, `kin.json`, `atlas.json` — or the whole repository. Translating a record is an adaptation and is allowed; so is correcting it, and a correction that is not marked as one will be read as this project's sentence.

One request that is not a term: the sources are cited by id, and a record travels better with its `sources[]` intact than with the citations stripped. Nothing in the licence requires keeping them. This record notes the difference between a requirement and a request every time it meets one.

Some of the material this atlas describes is restricted by the traditions it belongs to. Where that is so, the record carries a `restricted` block, the validator refuses that block unless it names who says so, and the detail is absent by design.

The LICENSE puts the consequence in one sentence: a licence permitting reuse of these records is not permission to fill that absence from elsewhere, and the project asks that reusers keep the restriction with the record it belongs to.

That is an ask and this record will not dress it as anything more. CC BY 4.0's second term forbids applying additional legal terms or technological measures that restrict what the licence permits — which means a project publishing under it cannot bolt on a clause requiring a restriction to travel, and could not enforce one if it did. The freedom that lets a reader take these records is the same freedom that lets a reader take a record's blank and fill it with a guess from a neighbouring tradition.

Inference — the only real defence against that is in the writing, not in the licence. A record whose `restricted` block names a body, a policy and a date is harder to quietly overwrite than one that only goes quiet in the right place. Which is why the restriction is written as a sourced claim with a claimant, in the same form as every other claim in the atlas — so that a reuser who strips it has to strip a citation, and notice themselves doing it.