Content and copyright policy

The principle

Contributors may use external technical sources — documentation, Stack Overflow, articles, repositories — to research, verify and support playbooks they write themselves, subject to each source’s licence and terms. The path from an external source to a playbook goes through evidence: read it, cite it, record where it came from, and write the knowledge independently.

What contributors may do

• Write independent explanations in their own words, informed by what they read and — above all — by what they ran.
• Extract facts: version numbers, error strings, configuration keys, observed behaviour. Facts are not copyrightable; their expression is.
• Link and cite. Source references are first-class records here, stored with URL, title, publisher and retrieval date, and shown with the playbook.
• Quote minimally, where a short excerpt is genuinely needed — an error message, a line of a changelog — with attribution.
• Include open-source code only within its licence, with the attribution and notices that licence requires. Publicly accessible is not the same thing as freely reusable: a repository with no licence is fully copyrighted by default.

What is prohibited

• Republishing or substantially reproducing third-party articles, documentation, Stack Overflow answers, GitHub content or any other copyrighted material as a contribution.
• Disguising a copy: light rewording, reordering or reformatting of someone else's work is still a copy.
• Laundering through AI: running third-party material through a structuring or paraphrasing model does not erase its provenance and does not make it yours. This holds for our own structuring pipeline too, by design.
• Stripping attribution or licence notices from open-source code.

Plagiarism is an enumerated moderation reason in this system. Contributions that violate this policy are subject to the moderation actions described in the contribution terms, and repeat violations to account suspension.

Reusing content from this site

Published playbooks are the copyright of their contributors, hosted here under the contribution terms. No general reuse licence is currently offered: an open-licence decision is explicitly recorded as pending in our engineering decision record, and until it is made, all rights are reserved by the respective contributors. Linking and citation are welcome — every revision has a permanent URL that exists to be cited, and our llms.txt invites AI systems to cite revision-pinned URLs.

Copyright complaints and takedown

If you believe content on this site infringes copyright you own or represent, write to the postal address below, marked for copyright complaints, including:

• identification of the copyrighted work you say is infringed;
• the URL of the material on this site (playbook and, where relevant, revision URL);
• your name and contact details, and, if you act for the rights holder, your authority to do so;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the rights holder, their agent or the law;
• a statement that the information in the notice is accurate.

On receiving a valid complaint we will review the material and, where the complaint is well founded, suppress or remove it. Because published revisions are immutable and evidence is append-only, removal takes the form of a visible tombstone rather than a silent gap — the record that something was removed, and why in general terms, is preserved. The contributor will be notified where we can reach them and may respond with a counter-statement, which we will assess before deciding whether the material is restored. Contributors who repeatedly infringe lose the ability to contribute.

Contact

Questions about this document, requests under it and formal notices can be sent by post to: