Licences in the Commons corpus

What each licence label on a search result means, and what it asks of you.

Clarrel Commons has no single blanket licence. The texts come from many sources under different terms, so each result carries its own licence label, and each label links to the section below that explains it. For the Commons' own charter and non-commercial commitment, see the terms page.

Public domain

No copyright restrictions on the underlying text.

The underlying work is out of copyright, so the text itself carries no licence conditions. Clarrel Commons does not treat this as a blanket property of any source catalogue: Project Gutenberg texts are checked work by work, from each eBook's own header block, rather than assumed from catalogue metadata, and Deutsches Textarchiv plain-text exports rest on that archive's own per-text declaration. Public-domain status established this way is US status. A translation is a separate work from the original: a translator's own copyright runs from the translator's death and is not settled by the original author being long out of copyright.

What Public domain requires

  • No attribution is legally required, though scholarly citation practice still applies.
  • No restriction on redistribution or derivative work.

CC BY-SA 4.0

Reuse permitted with attribution, under the same licence.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Applies to text from the Perseus and Open Greek and Latin projects and to the Deutsches Textarchiv's DiBiPhil/DiBiLit collections, where the licence is declared in each file's own TEI header rather than at repository level.

What CC BY-SA 4.0 requires

  • Attribution to the original source is required.
  • Derivative works of the text must carry the same licence (ShareAlike).
  • The ShareAlike obligation travels with the source text itself. Per QC-2, it does not propagate to Commons' own derived artifacts -- aligned edition pairs, embeddings and indexes are separately licensed under Commons' own terms while carrying source attribution.

Full licence text: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

GPL-2.0-or-later

Reuse permitted under the GNU General Public License.

GNU General Public License, version 2 or any later version -- the site-wide default stated by the Logic Museum, the source this applies to. An unusual licence for prose rather than software; it is recorded here as the source itself states it, not reinterpreted into a closer content licence.

What GPL-2.0-or-later requires

  • Attribution and licence notice must be preserved.
  • Derivative works must be distributed under the same licence.

Full licence text: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Licence not recorded

No licence is recorded for this source yet.

Clarrel Commons does not guess. If a source's rights basis has not been recorded against its own record, the result says so rather than assuming the text is public domain or offering a licence nobody verified. This is a gap in what has been recorded, not a statement that the text is unrestricted — treat it as "ask the source" and check the original before relying on it.