AI & Data-Mining Licensing

Freely permitted — no license needed

• Original texts & page images are in the public domain. Use them freely.
• Our AI-generated translations and editorial content are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 — free for individuals, researchers, and organizations, with attribution and ShareAlike.
• Search indexing. Search engines and AI search crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, Claude-SearchBot, OAI-SearchBot, …) are welcome to index our pages so readers can discover and cite them.
• AI assistants reading on a user’s behalf. When a person asks an assistant to read or quote a specific Source Library page, that’s welcome — please show the quote with its page number and the page’s sourcelibrary.org link.
• The public API & MCP server, within posted rate limits, for research and individual use. See /developers.

Reserved — a separate license is required

Using our content to train, fine-tune, or build AI models, and bulk text-and-data-mining (TDM) for those purposes, is expressly reserved and requires a separate license from us. This is true even though the translations are CC BY-SA 4.0: that license’s ShareAlike term would require any model built on this material to be released under CC BY-SA — which proprietary models do not do. So the free license does not authorize proprietary AI training. We reserve those rights and offer them under a separate agreement.

We reserve text-and-data-mining rights within the meaning of Article 4 of EU Directive 2019/790, expressed in machine-readable form via:

• /.well-known/tdmrep.json (TDM Reservation Protocol)
• the TDM-Reservation: 1 HTTP header on every response
• the training-crawler rules in /robots.txt

Bulk or training access is available — through the API or a dataset license, under a partnership. We’d genuinely like these texts in the models that shape how people learn; we just ask for a conversation and attribution. Please don’t scrape the full corpus around the controls.

Licensing & partnerships

For an AI-training or bulk-dataset license, or a research partnership, contact derek@sourcelibrary.org with the subject “AI Licensing Inquiry.” We respond within a day.