1. Who owns what

Cultural Heritage Online is a mixed archive. Different rules apply to different parts of it:

See also Ownership & Funding and the Masthead for who is responsible for what is published.

2. Filing a takedown notice

If you believe material on culturalheritageonline.com infringes a copyright you own or represent, send a written notice to our Designated Agent (contact details at the bottom of this page) that includes, as required by 17 U.S.C. §512(c)(3):

• A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or a person authorised to act on their behalf.
• Identification of the copyrighted work you claim has been infringed.
• Identification of the material you claim is infringing, with enough information for us to locate it — ideally the exact URL on our site.
• Your contact information: address, telephone number, and email address.
• A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the disputed use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
• A statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are authorised to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

3. What happens after we receive a notice

We remove or disable access to material identified in a complete, valid notice as expeditiously as possible, and notify the person who submitted or is credited with the material. This applies in particular to content submitted through our community and Ambassador programmes, which is reviewed editorially before publication but is not independently verified for third-party rights at the point of submission.

4. Counter-notice

If material you submitted was removed or disabled and you believe this was a mistake or misidentification, you may send a counter-notice to our Designated Agent that includes, as required by 17 U.S.C. §512(g)(3):

• Your physical or electronic signature.
• Identification of the material that was removed and the location where it appeared before removal.
• A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
• Your name, address and telephone number, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for your address (or, if outside the United States, for any judicial district in which we may be found), and that you will accept service of process from the person who filed the original notice.

Upon receiving a valid counter-notice, we forward it to the original complainant. Unless the complainant informs us within 10–14 business days that they have filed a court action seeking to restrain the alleged infringement, we may restore the material.

5. Reuse and citation — what you can do without asking

You do not need our permission to:

• Quote a short excerpt (two to three sentences) from an article or place record, in quotation marks, with a direct link back to the original page on culturalheritageonline.com.
• Link to any page on our site.
• Reference factual information from a place record — a venue’s name, city or GPS coordinates. Facts are not protected by copyright; the text we use to present them is.

You do need our written permission (via the contact form, starting your message with “Permission request”) to:

• Reproduce an article or place record in full or in substantial part.
• Reuse a photograph published on the site — including images sourced from Wikimedia Commons, since the licence on those images runs between the third party and the original author, not between the third party and CHO. Always check the licence stated on the image itself.
• Systematically copy or scrape more than a handful of pages.

6. Repeat infringers

Cultural Heritage Online will, in appropriate circumstances, disable or terminate the account of a user who repeatedly submits material found to infringe the rights of others.