Policy
Rights and Takedown
This site is designed as a public research map, not as a substitute distribution channel for the original works it discusses. Edition pages therefore use a conservative product policy: summary first, provenance first, commentary first, and only the amount of quoted material needed to orient readers, support criticism or review, and make the source citeable. This records an evidence-led archival policy, not definitive legal advice.
Four decisions, kept separate
The archive records copyright or rightsholder determination, editorial publication approval, public display policy, and retrieval policy as separate decisions. Finding a text online does not make it open; approving an edition does not establish copyright permission; allowing a short reviewed quotation does not authorize full-text display or model retrieval.
Unresolved ownership is recorded as undetermined, unknown-owner, or orphan-candidate rather than open. A public work may therefore remain useful as metadata, commentary, and a short reviewed quotation while its full recovered text stays in the private canonical corpus.
How excerpting works here
Quoted source text is stored and selected at the paragraph or chunk level rather than by a mechanical word-count target. The editorial question is whether a passage is necessary for orientation, commentary, or citation, not whether the page can expose the maximum amount of source text.
The UK Intellectual Property Office explains that fair dealing is assessed case by case, including whether a use substitutes for the original and whether the amount taken is reasonable and necessary; criticism, review, and quotation also require sufficient acknowledgement. See IPO guidance on copyright exceptions. The archive therefore records each intended use rather than treating quotation as an automatic blanket clearance.
Display modes
Public display is one of five explicit decisions: metadata-only, reviewed short quotation, annotated excerpts, full text, or suppressed. Full text requires both a separate editorial approval and a reviewed rights determination that permits that exact use.
Retrieval is decided independently as private-only, metadata-only, quote-safe, or suppressed. Public Search and Ask may receive only reviewed quote-safe excerpts; private source chunks are not a fallback. Quoted blocks can carry element-level no-snippet controls, while page-level noindex is used when a support page should remain available without circulating as a search destination.
Provenance and outbound links
Every edition page aims to carry owner, publisher, and archive-source links where those are known. The public layer should point outward into the ecosystem around the work rather than acting as a vacuum cleaner for extracted text.
Rights and provenance are now attached at source level as well as work-page level, so record pages, text support pages, and edition pages all inherit the same baseline rights state instead of inventing separate public descriptions.
Unknown and orphan works
A failed search for an owner is not evidence that a work is free to publish. Unknown owners remain unresolved. Orphan-candidate is a research state, not a licence or display permission.
Where an orphan-work route is appropriate, the UK process requires checking copyright and exceptions, conducting and documenting a diligent search, and applying for a licence where necessary. See IPO orphan-works guidance.
Takedown and suppression
If a rights-holder or authorized representative asks for a work or excerpt to be suppressed, the workflow is deliberately fast: the shared suppression registry can remove excerpts immediately, switch a page to metadata-first, and apply page-level noindex while the request is reviewed.
Rights concerns, factual corrections, and suppression requests go to rights@nothinghuman.org. Messages reach the archive's rights maintainer, and a suppression can be applied while a request is still under review.