How do I determine if a work in BHL is in the public domain?
For the United States, publications are in the public domain if they were published 95 years prior to the current year:
Public Domain = Current Year – 95
Works that may be in the public domain under United States law may not be in the public domain under the laws of other countries. You will have to research the copyright laws of the country where you wish to reuse the materials. BHL cannot and will not advise you or any other party about interpretation of your country’s copyright laws.
Generally speaking, the country where you plan to use the content and the nature of the use dictate what you can/cannot do as well as the level of risk involved. Commercial use carries higher risk than non-commercial use and in different countries there are different copyright laws governing use. Please review the copyright law for the country in which you plan to use or publish the content. BHL recommends consulting the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Lex database at https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/main/legislation for further information.
You may also contact the “Holding Institution” to verify the status of the specific book or volume.
Each book’s <Copyright Status> and <Holding Institution> fields can be found as part of an item’s “Volume details”:
Or via the “Show Info” tab in BHL’s book-viewer
Understanding Copyright Status
Copyright Status: Public domain
How it’s described
- “NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT”
- “Not specified”
- Blank
- Other
What it means
- The publications was published before 1924
- It is a United States government work
License
- Not Applicable
Can I reuse it?
- Yes
Copyright Status: No known copyright
How it’s described
- “No known copyright restrictions as determined by scanning institution.”
What it means
- The copyright has expired
- The copyright may have existed at one point but was not renewed
- There is no marking or indication of copyright on the material
- A sufficient and diligent search has been performed to determine that the copyright holder(s) cannot be located or identified
License
- Not Applicable
Can I reuse it?
- Yes, but proceed with caution. Verify the potential risk in the context of your specific reuse of the content.
Copyright Status: In copyright
How it’s described
- “In copyright. Digitized with the permission of the rights holder.”
What it means
- The publication is published by a BHL consortium member and digitized with permission.
- Permission obtained from rights holders to make content available in BHL’s collection. See our Permissions page for more details.
License
- Almost always a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
- On occasion, different Creative Commons licenses may be specified
- Review the <License Type> field included as part of the volume information under the “Copyright & Usage” section.
Can I reuse it?
- Yes, but you must adhere to the terms of the Creative Common license specified
- Usually, you can NOT reuse in-copyright content for commercial purposes
- Depending on how you wish to reuse the materials, you may need to obtain permission from the copyright holder directly
- Please review the information in the <Rights Holder> field to identify the copyright holder
How do I determine if an item in BHL is still in copyright?
You can tell if a work is in in-copyright by looking at the <Copyright Status> field. This information can be found as part of the item metadata, i.e. the data used to describe the attributes of a book or volume in BHL. Item metadata is available in 2 places:
Show Info tab
- Within BHL’s book-viewer, select the “Show Info” tab on the upper right
- scroll down to view the “Copyright & Usage” section to find the <Copyright Status> field.
Title pages
- When viewing the title information for a given work in BHL, view the list of volumes (“items”) on the right-hand side, click on the minus (“–“) or plus (“+”) sign to minimize/expand the volume (“item”) details.
- Review the information in the <Copyright Status> field under the “Copyright & Usage” section.
Can I use your files?
Yes, please! If the files are from a work in the public domain you are free to reuse it including commercial reuse. Please see the above sections to learn more about how to determine the copyright status of a title in BHL.
Generally speaking, the country where you plan to use the content and the nature of the use dictate what you can/cannot do as well as the level of risk involved. Commercial use carries higher risk than non-commercial use and in different countries there are different copyright laws governing use. Please review the copyright law for the country in which you plan to use or publish the content. BHL recommends consulting the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Lex database at https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/main/legislation for further information.
We appreciate attribution to the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the library that supplied the content for digitization. This makes it possible for other researchers to find our resources, and helps us to understand and demonstrate the impact of our digital collections. To attribute use, please use the following format:
- “Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Contributed by [Holding Institution]. | www.biodiversitylibrary.org”
In the case of space limitations, we recommend omitting the url. You can find the information about the “Holding Institution” by looking at the “volume details” as described above.
Example attribution statement: for an item in BHL scanned by Smithsonian Libraries, the preferred format is: “Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Contributed by Smithsonian Libraries. | www.biodiversitylibrary.org”
If the files are from a copyrighted work for which we have obtained permission, then all of the files on www.biodiversitylibrary.org are free for non-commercial use, as long as you abide by the terms set down in the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-NC-SA license).
For information about how to download content please see Download Help. BHL allows you to download whole books, specific articles, or individual pages in various resolutions.
Can I reuse content from BHL’s Flickr photostream?
Images in BHL’s Flickr photostream are subject to the same reuse permissions as outlined above. Please refer to the copyright statement in Flickr, or the corresponding item in BHL, to determine the copyright status of the item containing the image you wish to use.
To navigate to BHL from an image in Flickr, click the link beneath the image in the description field, as shown below.
Once viewing the item in BHL, you can follow the instructions outlined above to determine the book’s copyright status.
What does the Creative Commons (CC) license allow me to do?
Here’s a summary of the license rules:
- No commercial use – you cannot use images in BHL’s collection to make money, or for any commercial endeavor, without prior approval. Please feel free to use the images for your presentations, academic materials, non-profit publications, or non-profit web sites. If you want to include the images on your commercial web site, please read the commercial licensing provisions below.
- Provide attribution – we prefer “Image courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org“.
- Share alike – you must continue to apply the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license on the materials.
For more information, see Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
This license applies only to content stored within the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It does not apply to image files at other sites that are linked from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
What about commercial licensing?
You must contact the copyright holders for any commercial use. BHL will not and cannot give or withhold permission for commercial use of any work in BHL derived from a work under copyright. Using the metadata supplied with each volume, please determine the copyright holder or the institution that contributed the work and contact them directly. Please see the BHL Consortium page for more information about contributors. BHL will not act as “middle-man” in this communication.
What kinds of files are available for reuse?
The Biodiversity Heritage Library contains digital versions of important works of biodiversity literature. These digital versions are made up of a series of files such as JPEG2000 image files, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text files and XML metadata files.
For more information about what kinds of files are available for download and how to download our files, see:
- Download Help for instructions on downloading and viewing files.
- Data Exports for instructions on downloading BHL metadata files such as title and scientific name data files.
- Developer Tools & APIs for instructions on using standard protocols to harvest BHL data such as OAI-PMH and APIs.
Take-down Guidelines
BHL makes every effort to provide content within its collection that is freely and openly available for access and responsible reuse either under the public domain or a Creative Commons license. In-copyright materials are in BHL’s collection with the express permission of the copyright holder.
In rare cases, content may be removed if it is found to be in violation of copyright. Should a copyright holder make BHL aware of a potential infringement of copyright, BHL will confirm the claim and remove the content from its database (including the <biodiversity> collection of the Internet Archive). Works ingested from the Internet Archive corpus that are digitized by libraries other than BHL consortium libraries are the responsibility of the contributing library (“Holding Institution”) and not BHL.
For the United States, the copyright cut-off year is the current calendar year minus 95 years. In other words, works published prior to the current calendar year minus 95 years are in the public domain and are not restricted from access or reuse in the United States. In 2019, United States copyright law entered into its 95 year embargo or “moving wall” on public domain materials meaning that with every new calendar year, the copyright cut-off year will increase by one:
US copyright law cut-off year = [Current calendar year] – 95
If you are outside the U.S., you will need to review the copyright laws of the country where you plan to use the materials, see WIPO’s Lex Database: https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/main/legislation.
Post US copyright law cut-off year content is available in BHL for one or more of the following reasons:
- We have received explicit permission to provide the content online from the copyright holder.
- U.S. federal government publications are in the public domain.
- Works for which copyright was not renewed, according to the Stanford University Copyright Renewal Database and the Catalog of Copyright Entries
- Works made available via open access repositories such as the Internet Archive.
For more information about U.S. copyright, please consult Peter B. Hirtle’s Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States, which is an educational website maintained by Cornell University Library and updated regularly. For any questions or concerns regarding collection management and copyright, please contact the BHL Secretariat.
BHL does not claim copyright
The Biodiversity Heritage Library does not hold any copyrights on any files. If the original works from which the digital versions were produced are in the public domain, so too are the digital files. As the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Institutions composing BHL states, “All information currently in the public domain remains in the public domain. Neither BHL nor the data providers will seek to assert any IPR over public domain materials.”
In addition to works in the public domain, BHL contains digital versions of some works still under copyright protection for which BHL has obtained permission from the copyright holders. In these cases the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license applies. Most of these works are journals published by non-profit learned societies or research institutions whose mission is involved with biodiversity.
As more materials are added to the Biodiversity Heritage Library our usage terms may evolve. The Biodiversity Heritage Library is committed to keeping public domain materials in the public domain.
Is there any license applied to BHL’s data?
BHL makes its metadata available for public use under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication. This Creative Commons dedication allows you to reuse, modify, repurpose, and distribute the metadata for all purposes including commercial and non-commercial, with no need to ask for permission. The data in BHL’s collection is sourced and aggregated from its consortium partners and Internet Archive contributors. It is provided “as is,” without express or implied warranty as to accuracy, reliability, or fitness for any particular application. Please see our Data Disclaimer for more information.
Go ahead, take our metadata and do something creative with it! If you do repurpose BHL metadata please share your story with us. We often like to feature stories of reuse on our BHL blog.