04 — Boundaries and Licensing: the no-verbatim rule as armour
Version v0.33.62 · 25 August 2026
1. The founder's rule, and why it is also the legally correct one
The founder set the rule himself: "we will not quote verbatim, but should have detailed sections… where we explain what (and why) from them really resonate with me, and examples of where I applied that in practice." That instinct happens to be exactly what copyright law rewards. The site's own analysis, resonance and trace tables are original work and carry CC BY 4.0 cleanly. The anchor works — Victor's talks, Kelly's books, Rush's music, Rice's keynote — are other people's copyrighted material, and a CC BY site that rehosted them would be relicensing what it does not own.
The boundary, precisely:
- Link, never rehost. Talks embed from their canonical host (Vimeo/YouTube embeds are the host's licence, fine) or link out; transcripts stay at worrydream.com; book links go to the publisher or author's own page.
- Short attributed quotation for analysis — a sentence or two, quoted to be examined — is the fair-dealing/fair-use core and is allowed. Reproducing a talk's transcript section, a book chapter, or lyrics is not. Lyrics are the sharpest edge: music publishers enforce aggressively even for a single verse; the Rush entry describes and links, quoting at most a fragment under analysis.
- The founder's own words are unrestricted here — his articles, briefs and registers are his to publish, and the register format runs on them.
2. Likenesses
Infographics of people use original commissioned/generated artwork — never scraped photographs (photographer's copyright) and never AI-likeness renderings presented as portraits (personality-rights risk, and simple respect: several of these people are alive and known to the founder's community). Stylised original illustration, clearly the site's own, with the person named in text. For the deceased (Peart, Luhmann, Bush, Alexander, Ericsson, Csikszentmihalyi), the same rule for consistency.
3. The wider-library pages
/library/ lists other people's complete works. Listing facts (title, year, one-line description, link) is uncopyrightable metadata — safe. Cover images and stills are not: no book-cover thumbnails unless the publisher offers an affiliate/embed programme that licenses them.
4. Redrawn idea-infographics
The golden circle, the flow channel, Wardley's evolution axis: ideas are not copyrighted, expressions are. Redraw in house style from the underlying idea, attribute the idea's author prominently, never trace the original figure. (Sinek's golden circle is also a registered trademark in some uses — the redrawn figure is fine for commentary; do not use it as the site's branding.)
5. Conference recordings
OWASP talks (Rice's keynote, the founder's own) are typically CC-licensed or OWASP-hosted — check each recording's actual licence before embedding; OWASP's own channels are the preferred embed source. Commercial conference recordings (all-rights-reserved venues) get links, not embeds.
6. What CC BY covers on this site
Every page footer states it plainly: the site's text, trace tables, seed data, original artwork and redrawn figures are CC BY 4.0; the anchor works belong to their authors and are linked, not licensed. An agent consuming /llms-full.txt inherits the same split — the site must never put a third party's expression into the file it invites agents to ingest wholesale.
This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).
source: /briefs/05__gaps-and-open-questions.md