Licences & rights

Arts of Bodhi publishes under a layered rights model: different materials carry different licences. This page enumerates each licence the site relies on, what it grants, what it requires, and what it practically means for a reader who wants to read, cite, quote, archive, or re-use the material.

It is written as a reference, not legal advice. Where the law is split across jurisdictions (NL/EU vs US, in particular), this page states the position binding on bodhi — a Netherlands-based site — and notes the US contrast where it matters.

Quick map

If you want to…	Look at
Read articles, save pages, share links	Free, no permission needed
Quote a sentence or paragraph in your own work	Quotation right — yes, with attribution
Reproduce a whole article or translate it	CC BY-SA 4.0 — attribution + share-alike
Re-use an image	Per-source rights — depends on the tier
Fork or adapt the site code	MIT
Use the typefaces in your own project	SIL OFL 1.1
Re-publish a quoted passage from a named scholar	Not granted by bodhi — see quoted material

The four material layers

The site is composed of four kinds of material, each governed separately. Pick the one that applies to what you actually want to do.

Editorial prose — the writing produced for bodhi. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Site code — Astro components, layouts, build scripts. Licensed MIT. Typefaces bundled with the site are licensed SIL OFL 1.1.
Reproduced images — published under the rights line declared by the source collection. Bodhi grants no image rights it does not hold.
Quoted passages — under the rights of their authors and publishers; reproduced on bodhi under the quotation right.

Editorial prose — CC BY-SA 4.0

The editorial text on bodhi — articles, entity primers, disambiguation tables, digests, and these pages — is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

What it grants. You may copy, redistribute, translate, adapt, remix, and build on the text, for any purpose — including commercial — worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocably (within the term of copyright).

What it requires. Three obligations from §3 of the legal code:

Attribution. Credit “Arts of Bodhi”, the editor (Sam Shephard) if reasonable to do so, the licence (CC BY-SA 4.0), and a link to the source page where you took the text. Indicate any modifications you made.
ShareAlike. If you create an adaptation (a translation, a derivative reading, a remix that re-uses the text), your derivative must be released under CC BY-SA 4.0, a later version, or a CC-approved BY-SA-compatible licence (the official list is short — currently GPLv3 and Free Art License 1.3).
No additional restrictions. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the licence permits.

Mere collections — including the text alongside other separately- licensed works in an anthology, sidebar, or curated index — do not trigger ShareAlike. Only the bodhi text itself remains BY-SA; the collection as a whole can be licensed however you choose.

What it means for you. Quote any length with attribution. Translate freely. Fork an article into your own commentary — your commentary must also be BY-SA. Re-publish whole pieces on Wikipedia (BY-SA-compatible), Wikisource, or a personal blog, with attribution and a link back. Commercial use is explicitly permitted.

Canonical text: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.

Site code — MIT

The Astro components, layouts, build tooling, and content-processing scripts in the project repository are licensed under the MIT License.

What it grants. Use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell, with effectively no restrictions.

What it requires. Two things, per the licence text: (i) the copyright notice and (ii) the permission notice must travel together with any substantial portion of the code you redistribute.

What it does not cover. Patent rights are not granted (MIT, unlike Apache 2.0 §3, is silent on patents) and no warranty is offered — the ALL-CAPS disclaimer in the licence text disclaims merchantability, fitness, and non-infringement.

What it means for you. Take the code, build your own site, commercialise it. Keep the notice in the source tree.

SPDX identifier: MIT. Reference: spdx.org/licenses/MIT.html.

Typefaces — SIL OFL 1.1

The typefaces bundled with the site (EB Garamond, Source Serif 4, Inter, JetBrains Mono, Noto Serif JP) are each licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

What it grants. Free use in any document, software product, or website — commercial or otherwise. Modification and redistribution of the font files permitted.

What it requires. Five conditions; the load-bearing ones for a website operator: the font may not be sold by itself as a standalone product (bundling within software, documents, or pages is explicitly allowed); the OFL text and copyright notice must travel with the font file in redistributions; modified versions cannot use the original’s Reserved Font Names without permission. There is no attribution-on-output requirement — embedding the font on a web page does not require visible credit.

What it means for you. If you’re forking the bodhi site code or copying our typographic stack into your own project, you can ship these fonts. Keep the licence text alongside the font files.

SPDX identifier: OFL-1.1. Canonical text: openfontlicense.org/open-font-license-official-text.

Reproduced images

bodhi reproduces images from open-access museum collections under the rights line each collection declares. We do not grant image rights we do not hold. Re-use of any image depends on the underlying source’s rights statement, not on bodhi.

The site uses three tiers; the per-tier accounting and the takedown procedure are on the image-rights page.

Tier 1 — CC0 1.0 Universal (public-domain dedication)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (since 2017), Cleveland Museum of Art (since 2019), Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art (since 2020), and PD-Art images on Wikimedia Commons publish faithful reproductions of public-domain works under Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0).

What CC0 grants. A waiver, “overtly, fully, permanently, irrevocably and unconditionally”, of every copyright and Related Right the affirmer holds, to the greatest extent the applicable law permits — followed by a fallback irrevocable licence for any right that cannot be waived.

What CC0 does not waive in the EU. In the Netherlands, Germany, France, and other civil-law jurisdictions, moral rights are inalienable by statute. CC0 acknowledges this and the §3 fallback licence applies: a creator’s right of attribution and right of integrity survive. Editorially, this rarely matters — museum CC0 declarations cover the photograph, not the underlying medieval sculpture — but if you re-use a CC0 photograph credited to a named living photographer, the polite (and in some jurisdictions legally safer) move is to credit them.

What CC0 does not cover even on a museum’s “Open Access” page. The museum’s CC0 declaration applies only to works the museum has determined to be in the public domain. It does not cover: (a) modern works still in copyright; (b) third-party rights such as right of publicity for depicted individuals; (c) trademarks; (d) the catalogue text and metadata around the image, which the museum may license separately. On the Met API, only items with isPublicDomain: true are CC0.

What it means for you. No permission needed; no attribution legally required. We attribute anyway because credit is editorial discipline, not licence compliance.

Tier 2 — open-access in practice (terms of use)

ColBase / e-Museum (Independent Administrative Institution, National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan). Not a copyleft licence — terms of use anchored in Japanese copyright law. The terms permit free use, commercial or non-commercial, without prior application, provided the source is clearly indicated. The verbatim Japanese attribution required is:

出典：ColBase（https://colbase.nich.go.jp/）

The English equivalent — “Source: ColBase (https://colbase.nich.go.jp/)” — is accepted in English-language contexts. Two material caveats: (a) some works carry third-party rights (modern photography of objects, restoration photography) that NICH disclaims; (b) the terms are unilaterally amendable, which is why bodhi re-verifies them annually against the official wording at colbase.nich.go.jp/pages/term?locale=en.

KOGL Type 1 (Korea Open Government Licence, National Museum of Korea). The most permissive of the four KOGL types. Commercial and non-commercial use permitted; derivatives permitted; no share-alike. Required attribution names the institution, year, work title, author, and source URL. Terms: kogl.or.kr/info/license.do.

What Tier 2 means for you. Use the image; carry the verbatim attribution; do not strip the source line.

Tier 3 — text-only, never reproduced

Some collections — the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA), the Victoria and Albert Museum (CC BY-NC), most temple holdings, all auction-house imagery — publish under terms bodhi has chosen not to operate under. We cite their accession records and link to their catalogue pages; we do not reproduce the image.

For completeness, the legal scope of the two CC-NC family licences:

CC BY-NC 4.0: attribution + non-commercial only. Creative Commons defines NonCommercial as “not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation”. The test is the licensee’s use, not their identity. Ad-supported sites and AI training-for-commercial-models are in the contested grey zone; bodhi treats this as commercial in practice.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: attribution + non-commercial + share-alike; cumulative restrictions. There are currently no CC-approved BY-NC-SA-compatible licences for the share-alike step.

References: CC BY-NC 4.0, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, CC’s NonCommercial study.

Why a 19th-century museum photograph of a Kamakura sculpture is public domain

US law (Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191, S.D.N.Y. 1999) holds that faithful 2D photographic reproductions of public-domain 2D works lack the originality needed for new copyright.

The EU position is now codified and stronger. Article 14 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 (the DSM Directive) provides that when the copyright term of a work of visual art has expired, “any material resulting from an act of reproduction of that work is not subject to copyright or related rights, unless the material resulting from that act of reproduction is original in the sense that it is the author’s own intellectual creation”. Implementation deadline was 7 June 2021; the Netherlands implemented it as Auteurswet Art. 15g, Germany as §68 UrhG.

Practical consequence. A faithful frontal photograph of a 12th- century Kannon — whether taken by an unnamed 19th-century photographer or by a present-day museum — cannot give the museum or the photographer a new copyright in the Netherlands, anywhere in the EU. This is why the museum CC0 declaration is unproblematic for medieval Japanese sculpture.

But. Article 14 covers visual art. For 3D objects photographed with creative framing, lighting, and angle choices, Painer (C-145/10) still applies: if the photographer made free and creative choices, the photograph may still attract originality-based copyright. Most museum catalogue photography is the faithful-record kind that falls within Article 14; creative installation photography may not.

Reference: DSM Directive 2019/790, Art. 14; Auteurswet Art. 15g.

Quoted passages

Excerpts from named scholars (Bogel, Saunders, Mōri, Rosenfield, and others), museum-published catalogue text, and primary-text translations (Hurvitz on the Lotus Sūtra, Inagaki on the Pure Land sūtras, Yamamoto and Hodge on the Mahāvairocana Sūtra, Murakami / Stryk on the Zen texts, and the rest of the reading pool) are reproduced on bodhi under the quotation right below.

These passages remain under the rights of their authors and publishers. Bodhi grants no licence to quoted material. If you intend to re-use a quoted passage in your own work, consult the original source and consult the rights-holder’s terms — or rely on the quotation right yourself.

Quotation right

The applicable mechanism. US “fair use” (17 USC §107) is a defence in US courts, not a transplantable licence. As a Netherlands-based site, bodhi operates under Auteurswet Art. 15a (the Dutch quotation right), itself derived from Article 5(3)(d) of the EU InfoSoc Directive 2001/29/EC. Article 5(5) (the three-step test) sits over all of it.

Auteurswet Art. 15a permits quotation from a lawfully-disclosed work when five conditions are met:

The quote serves a purpose — announcement, review, polemic, scientific treatment, or “comparable purpose”. The quote must be functionally integrated with your own argument, not decorative.
The extent is justified by the purpose. There is no statutory word/page cap; courts apply proportionality. In practice, “as much as needed, rarely whole works, never the heart of the work”.
The source is clearly named, including the author.
The work has been lawfully made public.
The integrity of the quoted text is respected — no distortion of meaning.

The CJEU (Pelham, Spiegel Online, Funke Medien) further requires the user to be in dialogue with the quoted work. Pure illustration without engagement does not qualify.

What it means for you. If you quote bodhi for an essay or review, you have the same right we do. Attribute the author, link the source, quote no more than the purpose requires, and engage with the text.

Reference: Auteurswet Art. 15a; InfoSoc Directive 2001/29/EC, Arts. 5(3)(d) and 5(5).

For US-based readers, US fair use under 17 USC §107 applies in your own publication, judged on the four factors (purpose, nature, amount, market effect). The US analysis is your own; bodhi does not warrant it.

Public domain by age — Japan

The copyright term in Japan for named-author works is life + 70 since 30 December 2018 (TPP-11 implementation; previously life + 50). For anonymous, pseudonymous, or workshop works — which describes the bulk of pre-modern Japanese Buddhist art — the term is 70 years from publication (or 70 years from creation if never published), per Copyright Act Article 52.

Practical consequence: every pre-modern work covered on bodhi — Asuka, Hakuhō, Heian, Kamakura, Nanbokuchō, Muromachi, Edo, and most Meiji — is unambiguously in the public domain in Japan. The live question on any image is the photograph of the work, not the work itself, and that question is resolved in the EU by DSM Art. 14 (above).

Reference: Japan Copyright Act, Arts. 51–52.

When a museum declaration turns out to be wrong

CC0 declarations by museums are not binding on the actual rightsholder. If a museum has incorrectly CC0’d a work that was still in copyright (a contemporary artist’s print, a still-protected photograph), the rightsholder retains a cause of action against any republisher — including bodhi.

bodhi’s posture against this risk:

Every image is verified at the file-page level against the source’s published rights statement, not the API summary.
Provenance receipts (source URL, capture date, rights-line text) are kept in frontmatter for every image.
Good-faith reliance on a museum CC0 declaration reduces — but does not eliminate — operator exposure. Under Dutch law, verwijtbaarheid (culpability) governs non-statutory damages; documented good-faith reliance and prompt takedown materially limit liability.
Reproductions contested in good faith are taken down pending verification, not after. The full procedure is on the image-rights page.

References: Auteurswet Art. 27 (injunction) and Art. 27a (damages); EU IP Enforcement Directive 2004/48/EC. Statute of limitations: 5 years from knowledge, capped at 20 years from the act (Burgerlijk Wetboek Art. 3:310).

How to attribute bodhi’s editorial prose

A minimal attribution line for a re-used passage:

Arts of Bodhi, “[Article title]”, Sam Shephard, ed., licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Available at: https://artsofbodhi.com/articles/[slug]/

For an image, reproduce the rights line as it appears in the figure caption. Where the source is ColBase, reproduce the verbatim Japanese attribution the source requires:

出典：ColBase（https://colbase.nich.go.jp/）

Questions and inquiries

For licence inquiries — re-use proposals that fall outside the terms above, requests for relicensing, or compatibility questions — see the contact page for routing.

For image-rights claims or takedown notices, the dedicated procedure is on the image-rights page.