Commercial licensing
Commercial licensingCOMMERCIAL LICENSING
Text and images on this site are licensed separately. Text is already open and needs no application; what needs a signed agreement is images, and the services built on them.
One sentence first
The entries on this site are published under CC BY-SA 4.0. That licence allows commercial use, so you may quote, republish or adapt the text without applying to this site and without paying — you need only credit the source and share alike. Any claim that commercial use of the text requires a fee to this site conflicts with the licence, and this site does not assert it.
What can be licensedWHAT CAN BE LICENSED
| Type | What it covers | Typical uses |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial image licence | Photographs of custom taken by this site or licensed to it; high-resolution archive images of dress and embroidery | Publishing, merchandise, exhibitions, courses, advertising, film and television |
| Value-added dataset | Structured folk-custom metadata with collation notes, coordinates and chronological alignment — see Datasets | Research projects, model training, institutional databases |
| Commissioned work | Writing on a set topic, county-by-county comparison drafts, course material packs, institutional search and sorting | Field studies, museums, local history projects |
Unpublished comparison drafts and collation records fall outside the CC licence and can be agreed separately.
How to applyPROCESS
- Apply in writing: who will use it, for what, over what scope and period, and which items.
- Both sides check: ownership of the material, the scope of the licence, and whether redistribution is allowed.
- Sign an agreement: fee, territory, term, credit line, remedies for breach.
- Pay and receive: on payment, the licence certificate and the high-resolution originals are issued with a licence number.
Applications: chirca@163.com, with “commercial licence” in the subject line. If the scope is unclear and you want to ask first, the contact page has WeChat and WhatsApp. Public-interest use by government bodies, schools and museums may qualify for a reduced fee or a waiver.
Revenue shareREVENUE SHARE
Where a commercial fee arises from material a contributor licensed, it is divided in the proportion agreed in writing at submission. If no proportion was agreed, it is split half and half between the site and the contributor, confirmed in writing before the first licence is issued.
Public-domain material generates no copyright revenue of itself. This site’s digitisation and captions made for the original are handled under the image-layer terms.
BoundariesBOUNDARIES
A paying party may not influence the conclusions of an entry, ask for unfavourable records to be suppressed, or require a brand to appear in an entry. Commissioned work and scholarly work are presented in separate sections and never run together.
This site does not provide auspice-reading, divination or horoscope content, and does not license images for such uses.
Original text on this site is CC BY-SA 4.0; images are all rights reserved and commercial use requires a separate licence.
Last revised: 3 November 2026