Our Copyright Policy
Our work is provided for the benefit of our Deaf Community. It is in our interest to share our stories widely. We encourage people to take, copy and share our work, just as we promote our Deaf community. But this is about respect and giving back, not 'theft'. We ask that people follow these rules.
Our general policy is to release all of our stories under a BY- NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons license. But much of our content is provided by the community. Some authors may choose to use a different license. Check the license attached to the story! We encourage you to contact us or the author of the story if you have questions or concerns.
What does this license mean?
By: Attribution
- You need to give us credit for providing the story. Credit must be shown prominently and in a clearly identifiable manner.
- We ask that you identify the name of the author and DeafMN with the byline, or another appropriate location. We encourage you to use this phrasing: "This story was originally published by Author Name at DeafMN".
- You also need to link back to us. Linking back to the source material is most ideal.
NC: Non-Commerical
- You may not earn money off reuse of our work.
- Republishing on your site that has advertising is fine. Republishing on a site that is FOR commercial purposes is not fine (EX: ad sites, SEO sites).
- You cannot sell our material, or use it to earn money (fundraising). You may request an exception by contacting us.
ND: Non-Derivative
- You may not change this story. Provide the whole story unchanged, without editing it.
- Minor changes to match your location, dates, or your style are fine. (Such as "here" instead of "St. Paul" or "today" instead of "next week". )
- Our exception: We actually encourage having our stories translated from ASL/English (and vice versa). We ask that such translations be provided back to us.
Want to learn more about why we do this?
Our rules were written with a heavy dose of inspiration from Propublica's "Steal our Story" page. Learn more about why the Pulitzer Prize winning Propublica uses Creative Commons.
Creative Commons has a Wiki Page of Newsrooms who use Creative Commons. This includes ProPublica, The Huffington Post Investigative Fund, Al Jazeera, and many others.
The Legal Terms behind our license.