Content Licence

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Unknown Tales is a collaborative writing commons. All content submitted to this platform, including stories, chapters, and branching paths, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence.

What you keep

You retain full copyright over everything you write. Submitting a chapter does not transfer ownership to Unknown Tales or to any other contributor.

What you share

By submitting content you grant:

  • Unknown Tales: a licence to display, reproduce, and host your work as part of the platform.
  • Every reader and future contributor: a licence to read, share, and build upon your work, provided they credit you and release any derivative work under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 terms.

The copyleft nature of CC BY-SA means every chapter that grows from yours inherits the same licence, keeping the whole story tree open.

What this rules out

The CC BY-SA 4.0 licence means that without your separate written permission:

  • Story trees may not be repackaged and sold as a standalone product.
  • Contributions may not be exclusively licensed to a publisher.
  • Contributions may not be used to train a commercial AI model.

Attribution

CC BY-SA 4.0 requires that you are credited when your work is shared or built upon. On Unknown Tales, your username is displayed as the author of all content you submit to the platform (including stories, chapters, and paths). These bylines are the canonical attribution record on this platform.

If you close your account, your username is retained as an attribution string on all your published content so that the licence requirement continues to be fulfilled.

Your warranty

By submitting content you confirm that you hold the rights to it and that publishing it here does not infringe anyone else’s copyright or other rights.

Further reading

The full legal text of the licence is available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode. Creative Commons also provides a plain-language summary.

Questions

Questions about licensing? Email us at daniel@unknowntales.net.