Rights & reuse

Every record carries an explicit rights object. Nothing about copyright, licensing, or permission to reuse an image is inferred, guessed, or calculated by this codebase — every value is one a human reviewer typed in after doing the work.

Why "free to use" on a source page isn't enough

Institutional source pages sometimes carry statements like "free to use" or "no known copyright restrictions." Those statements matter, but they are not the same thing as this archive's internal rights review, because:

• Institutional statements are often written for their own on-site use, not for a third party republishing images elsewhere.
• Copyright status can vary by jurisdiction, and a US institution's page may not reflect rights in other jurisdictions.
• "Free to use" frequently covers research or personal use, not commercial redistribution — this archive tracks those as separate permissions.
• A source statement can be wrong, outdated, or narrower than it reads at a glance.

That's why sourceRightsStatement (what the institution says) and rights.status (this archive's own determination) are two different fields, and why a record stays unreviewed until a person has actually done that comparison. The seed record in this repository is a live example: its source page says "Free to use," but its rights.status is still unreviewed and it is not published.

The rights.status vocabulary

• unreviewed — default; no one has assessed rights yet.
• researchOnly — usable for internal research, not for public display.
• metadataOnly — the record itself can be described publicly, but no image.
• cc0 — public domain dedication, verified.
• publicDomainVerified — confirmed public domain by another means.
• licensed — usable under a specific license a reviewer has recorded in notes.
• permissionGranted — explicit permission obtained directly.
• internallyCreated — created by this project, not sourced from a third party.
• excluded — deliberately excluded from any public use.

Permissions

Each record's rights.permissions object separately tracks:

• research — internal research use
• displayInApp — retained for future compatibility with the TattooKnowledgeCore vocabulary; this project does not import or link to TattooKnowledgeCore, and this field currently only affects whether this static site displays an image
• commercialDistribution — reuse in commercial contexts
• modification — permission to alter the image
• derivativeCreation — permission to create derivative works
• trainingOrEmbedding — permission to use in machine-learning training or embeddings (not exercised anywhere in this codebase; recorded for future reference only)

Attribution

rights.attribution records whether attribution is none, requested, required, or unknown, and rights.attributionText holds the exact line to use when it is. The top-level attributionLine field is what this site actually displays alongside a record.

What this site will never do

• Guess or calculate copyright status from a date or a source name.
• Publish an image because a source page said something favorable, without a human rights review.
• Treat "metadata is public" as "image is public" — those are separate gates.