Copyright and reuse

The text: CC BY-SA 4.0

Every word folkroom writes is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. You may copy, translate, adapt and sell it. Two conditions: credit the source, and release your version under the same licence so the next person has the freedom you had.

Machine-composed pages carry text from Wikipedia, which is CC BY-SA already. That is stated on the page, and it is why the licence is ShareAlike rather than something looser — we pass on the terms we received.

How to attribute

Every entry carries a citation line at its foot. Copy it. The shape is:

“Kathakali.” folkroom, https://folkroom.org/art-forms/kathakali — text CC BY-SA 4.0.

Link the URL where the medium allows it. In print, the URL in full is enough. Do not imply folkroom endorses your work, and do not attribute to folkroom something we did not write.

The images are NOT covered by that licence

This is the part people get wrong, so it is the part in bold: each photograph carries its own licence, its own photographer, and its own terms. They come from Wikimedia Commons, Openverse and Flickr under a range of Creative Commons licences — some ShareAlike, some Attribution only, some non-commercial.

The licence and the photographer are printed on every image on the site, and the source URL is one click away. Reusing folkroom’s text does not give you any right to the photographs beside it. Check each one.

Data, in bulk

A public archive that cannot be taken away from its publisher is not really public. Help explains how to get the record in bulk rather than by scraping it a page at a time, which is slower for you and more expensive for everyone else.

If we have used something of yours

Tell us and we will act. We would rather remove something quickly and discuss it afterwards than leave a rights holder waiting.

Write to copyright@folkroom.org with:

• the URL on folkroom where the material appears;
• what the material is, and where it originally appeared;
• enough to show the right is yours, or that you act for the holder;
• how to reach you.

We aim to acknowledge within 3 working days and to resolve within 10. If the claim is clear we remove first. Removals are logged, and the count appears in the transparency report without naming the parties.

If you believe something was removed wrongly, reply to the same address and say so. A different person reviews it.

Traditional and community knowledge

Copyright is not the only right that matters here, and in this field it is often not the one that matters most. A practice can be out of copyright and still not ours to publish.

If you speak for a community whose knowledge appears on folkroom and it should not be public — or should be described differently, or credited differently — write to copyright@folkroom.org and say so. You do not need to make a legal argument. We will take the page down while we talk.