Intellectual Property Rights & Open Source with Attribution
We are openly mirroring the philosophy of the MIT Library by stating that all Quietly Working organizations and projects carry the designation Licensed under the Creative Commons License unless otherwise noted.
The Creative Commons license we chose for the text at our site is the “Attribution-ShareAlike” license.This license, which we’ve applied only to the text at our site, allows anyone to share or remix our text for their own purposes, as long as they attribute the source and share the resulting creations under the same or similar terms.
The Attribution-ShareAlike CC license does not apply to other media at our site. Images, figures, and other non-text content are “all rights reserved.” We do not normally have the rights to this nontext content, so we can’t include it in the CC license.
We also do not have the right to share all of the text we mount on our site. Exceptions are indicated with a phrase “all rights reserved” somewhere on the page containing text that we cannot share under the CC license. The phrase “all rights reserved” overrides the standard message of the footer.
The copyright policy of the website mirrors the purpose of the website.The website is dedicated to promoting MIT’s mission of disseminating research as widely as possible, through supporting MIT authors in retaining rights to their work so that they can openly share their work.
Consistent with this vision of a world without unnecessary barriers to access, content included in this website is intended to be openly shared or adapted (with attribution) as needed.
It takes a little more time and a little more thought to manage a site that is licensed under CC. We think the long-term goal of creating a world that maximizes the potential for sharing insights and ideas is worth extra time and effort.
Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to “building a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules.”Creative Commons
Since 2001, CC has been working to provide “free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.”
Using Creative Commons licensing, authors can change copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” (where the copyright holder retains the full bundle of rights assigned to the creator under copyright law) to “Some Rights Reserved” (where the copyright holder offers some nonexclusive rights to users of the content, without requiring them to seek permission).
More on: Creative Commons
How to notify us about copyright concerns
Quietly Working highly respectful of intellectual property rights and make every effort to ensure that we have appropriate rights to provide online access to our digital collections. Every effort is made to assess the copyright status of all materials and to ensure that the Libraries’ use is in full compliance with U.S. copyright law. In some instances, however, rights status may be difficult or impossible to determine.
If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material available in our digital collections without your permission, and believe our inclusion of this material violates your rights (e.g. inclusion is not covered by Fair Use or another exemption to a copyright holder’s rights), please contact abuse@quietlyworking.org.
When contacting us, the more information you can supply, the more responsive we can be. It is particularly helpful if you include the following:
- Your contact information (including email address, postal address, and phone),
- Exact URL where you found the material,
- Details that describe the material (title, collection name, number of items, etc.),
- The reason why you believe that your rights have been violated, with any pertinent documentation,
- A statement that you in good faith believe that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law, and
- A statement that the information in your notification is accurate and that you are the rights holder or are authorized to act on behalf of the owner.