Copyright and licensing
Content here is licensed in three layers. The rules differ, so work out first which layer you are using.
| Layer | Covers | Status | In short |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Entries, documentary compilations, research notes | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Commercial use allowed; credit and share alike; no added restrictions |
| Images | Photographs taken by the site, submitted photographs | All rights reserved | Licensed for display on this site only; commercial use, redistribution and AI training need a separate agreement |
| Data | Folk-custom metadata | CC BY 4.0 | Free to use and redistribute with credit; value-added editions licensed separately |
Text layer: CC BY-SA 4.0
Original entries, documentary compilations and research notes are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
That licence permits any use, including commercial use. This site adds no restriction and could not: the licence expressly forbids extra conditions on downstream users. Reuse asks two things of you: credit “Chaoshan Wiki” (Chaoshan Wiki) and say whether you changed anything; and release any adaptation under CC BY-SA 4.0 or a compatible licence.
There is therefore no “commercial licence required” for text, and no text licensing fee. If what you need is a designed manuscript, collation notes or unpublished comparison drafts, that is a different service — see Commercial licensing.
Licence text: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode. This page is a licensing statement, not legal advice.
Image layer: all rights reserved
Photographs taken by the site, field photographs, submitted images and the picture library are not under a Creative Commons licence. Copyright stays with the photographer or with this site.
Being shown on the site is not a licence to use. Three uses need written permission in advance: commercial use (publishing, merchandise, advertising, courses, tourism projects, exhibitions); redistribution and sub-licensing; use in AI model training.
Third-party stock images are a separate category again: copyright belongs to the library and the photographer, and this site uses them under the library’s own terms, logged image by image (asset number, licence type, download date, purpose). No sub-licensing is granted, so anyone republishing a page from this site may not carry those images with it.
A small number of field recordings come from material posted by users on media platforms such as Douyin, and are used for individual event entries. Copyright rests with the poster; this site holds no licence and uses them by citation: the caption gives the posting account and date, each is logged, and any is removed on request from the poster or rights holder. Such images illustrate that event only and are not used as generic filler.
Submitted photographs come in two categories: A grants this site non-exclusive display while the photographer keeps copyright and may publish elsewhere; B grants non-commercial online display here only, with no downloading, forwarding or adaptation. Neither includes commercial rights; a commercial user must sign separately.
Images are watermarked and hotlink-protected, but technical measures only reduce scraping, they cannot prevent it. What is agreed in writing governs.
Data layer: CC BY 4.0
The folk-custom metadata set published here — entry identifier, title, section, place tags, documentary source, field location, asset licence type, calendrical anchor, update date — is released under CC BY 4.0: free to use, adapt and redistribute, with credit and a note of any changes.
Structured value-added editions that include collation notes, geographic coordinates and chronological alignment are licensed separately.
Calendar and sky data come from Chujia Kuang’s Historical Astronomy and Calendar site, whose own terms apply; this site does not license them on that site’s behalf. Those datasets are released under CC BY 4.0 with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22788686; reuse must keep the attribution, the source link, the licence notice and the DOI, as set out in each dataset’s own documentation. The computational basis and academic identifiers are described in section 9 of Sources.
Public domain material
Woodblock illustrations from old gazetteers, century-old photographs and similar public-domain material fall outside the licences above and may be used freely. Where this site uses such material it logs the source and the basis for the judgement (date of compilation, date of publication, holding library) and marks it “public domain, no copyright restriction”.
What is public domain is the original. The digitisation, colour correction and captions added here remain within this site’s terms.
If you need an image, or the boundary is unclear
Commercial image use, redistribution and AI training require a separate agreement. Originals in the public domain are free to use; this site’s digitisation and captions do not travel with them.
If you cannot tell which layer applies, the contact page explains how to ask and how long a reply takes. Asking first is less work than negotiating afterwards.
Original text on this site is CC BY-SA 4.0; images are all rights reserved and commercial use requires a separate licence.
Editor: Chujia Kuang (邝楚嘉, 嘉言一得) · Contact: chaoshanwiki@gmail.com
Last revised: 3 November 2026