# PoetryDB — Data License

**The PoetryDB data is licensed under the
[Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).**
Full legal code: <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode>.

This is separate from the **software** license: the code that runs PoetryDB is
released under the GNU General Public License v2 (see `LICENSE.txt`). This file
covers the **data**.

## What this covers — and what it doesn't

The individual poem **texts** are in the **public domain** — they are sourced
from public-domain editions (chiefly Project Gutenberg, and occasionally other
public-domain archives). CC BY 4.0 does **not** and cannot restrict your use of
those public-domain texts in isolation.

What CC BY 4.0 covers is the **editorial edition and the database** — the work
that makes PoetryDB more than a pile of raw texts:

- the **selection and curation** of which poems and poets are included;
- the **editorial corrections and normalisation** (fixing OCR/transcription
  defects, standardising titles to a consistent house style, splitting long
  works into their canonical divisions, removing editorial apparatus);
- the **structuring** (per-poem records, line and linecount semantics, the
  `source`/provenance field);
- the **author biographies**;
- and the **database as a whole** — in the UK/EU this is additionally protected
  by the *sui generis* database right, which rewards the substantial investment
  in obtaining, verifying, and presenting the collection.

In short: take the public-domain poems freely; but if you reuse **PoetryDB's
curated dataset** — a bulk copy, the biographies, the corrected/standardised
titles, or a substantial extract of the database — **please attribute it.**

## How to attribute

A link and a line are enough. For example:

> Poetry data from **PoetryDB** (https://poetrydb.org), curated by The Combed
> Thunderclap, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

or in code/JSON:

```
"attribution": "PoetryDB — https://poetrydb.org — CC BY 4.0"
```

If you build something with it, we'd love to hear about it (see **Contact** in
the README). Credit is all we ask — the project remains free and open, in the
spirit in which it was made.