Licensing and attribution
This product is built from other people's work and intends to be reusable as other people's building material. Both directions have conditions, and they are stated rather than buried.
What Scrollwork is built from
| Source | Licence and obligation |
|---|---|
| Theographic Bible Metadata, by Robert Rouse | CC BY-SA 4.0. People, places, events, passages and the relationships between them. Attribution is required, and share-alike means anything derived from it carries the same licence — including this product's corpus. |
| EB Garamond, UnifrakturCook, Pinyon Script | SIL Open Font License. Served from this domain; each licence ships beside the font file. |
| Canon definitions | Written here from the councils and confessions they cite, and published under CC BY-SA 4.0 to match the corpus they join. |
What you may do with Scrollwork
The data
CC BY-SA 4.0. The corpus — every fact with its source, confidence and chronology — may be copied, adapted and used commercially, provided you credit it and license what you build under the same terms. That is not a choice; it is inherited from the sources above, and passing it on is the condition under which this exists at all.
The writing, the design, and the mark
All rights reserved. The prose on this site, the page design, and the Scrollwork name and mark are not covered by the data licence. Quote them as you would quote any writing; do not present them as your own or use the mark to suggest a connection that does not exist.
The code
The corpus and its provenance records become public at first release, under the share-alike licence above. The application's own code stays private.
The split is about what is useful rather than what looks open. Published data lets you check whether a citation resolves or a date carries the chronology it was recorded under, and lets you build something else with it. Publishing the interface would let you read the interface.
Scripture text
Passage text in the corpus is the King James Version, which is in the public domain. That is not an aesthetic preference; it is what lets 31,102 verses be stored, searched and redistributed under the same open licence as everything else here.
A modern translation would need a licence, and the reason is worth stating plainly. The New American Standard Bible allows generous quotation without written permission — but the same permission forbids storing more than 1,000 verses in an electronic retrieval system, and a searchable corpus of the whole text is exactly that. So carrying NASB, ESV or any modern translation means a written agreement with its publisher, not a notice at the bottom of a page.
Where a modern translation is quoted in the meantime, it is named on the passage with its own copyright notice — never silently. The quotation on the donate page is the only one at present.
If something here is yours
If you believe work of yours is used without the right licence or the right credit, say so with enough detail to find it. It will be corrected or removed — the point of this project is that its sources are traceable, and a source used wrongly is a failure of the thing it claims to be good at.