Licence and how to reuse
What you may do with the templates, the pages and the method on this site: more or less everything, commercial purposes included, on one condition only, that you credit ODERSA.
The licence
One open licence, over all the content
Everything you read on Letters That Work (the letter templates, the pages that teach the method, the articles in the journal) is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, known as CC BY 4.0.
That licence is permissive: it allows copying, translation, adaptation and reuse in a paid setting, on one condition only, that you credit Letters That Work. There is no request to write and no permission to wait for: the licence is already the permission.
Check at source
The text of the licence
The two addresses below are Creative Commons' own, checked before this page was written.
- The summary, in English what the licence allows and what it requires, in plain language
- The full legal text, in English the version that governs
In practice
What you may do
- Copy a template or a page, as it stands.
- Translate it into another language.
- Print it for a public scribe's session, a media library or a centre helping people with official procedures.
- Take it up in a printed guide, a leaflet or training material.
- Adapt it to the law and the customs of another country.
- Use it in a paid training course or any other commercial activity.
That last point is said plainly: the CC BY 4.0 licence forbids no commercial use. A training company, a publisher or a local authority may take this content into a paid offering. Only a Creative Commons licence carrying the “NC” mark would have prevented it, and that is not the one chosen here.
Crediting a reuse
The wording, ready to copy
To credit a reuse, one sentence is enough: “Templates and method taken from Letters That Work (letters.odersa.org), a service of the ODERSA association, under the CC BY 4.0 licence.” The name of the service and the address are enough: there is no individual author to name and no edition to specify.
The limit
What the licence does not cover
This licence covers what Letters That Work writes: the wording of the templates, their structure, the method taught on this site. It does not cover the legal texts cited inside a template. An article of a code, a regulation or a directive belongs to the public law of its country, and can be consulted freely at its own source, whatever licence is applied here.
Taking up a template therefore means taking up its shape and its words, never a right that nobody owns.
- How a reference enters the collection every text cited, with its address and the date it was read
Reuse by machine
The open data
The content of the site can also be read as JSON, under the same licence, for anyone who would rather process it automatically than copy it by hand.
- The whole collection, templates and articles one JSON file, updated at every publication
- The site's counters the counters of the collection, recounted on disk at every publication