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Copyright and Licensing Information

The original Chinese texts and pictures from the classics are mostly public domain. The translations however are under copyright. Licence to use the material is usually very permissive as almost everything are published under Creative Commons. Remember it is illegal to sell translations without authors written permissions. Even if the chosen license permits commercial use of the material it is still advised to contact the owner first before using any of the material. Publishing without permission is unethical and the copyright holder (ie. translator) retains the full right to restrict the use and demand removal even after someone publishes the material.

All the translations are the intellectual property of translators and the translators hold all the rights to their work. The translation projects within the library may have many translators
and they all share the copyright for the work.

The creator of the page selects the licence. The licence cannot be changed after the initial choice as the licensing might affect the willingness of other participants. To view the licence chosen check the question mark (?) at the upper right corner of each page.

For more information about Creative Commons licensing see Creative Commons homepage

Copyright for the dictionaries

The editors and contributors hold the copyright for any community created materials. The community created materials in the dictionary are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. This means you can edit, share the material and you can use it for your own works.

Other included dictionaries are under copyright and have different licensing policy. Therefore the users cannot edit them within the TaoTao-Project.

Under GPL-licence

Chinese-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries

  • 說文解字
  • 懶蟲簡明漢英詞典
  • 朗道汉英字典
  • 湘雅医学专业词典
  • 高级汉语大词典
  • 21世纪双语科技词典 (21 century bidirectional science and technology dictionary)
  • 21世紀英漢漢英雙向詞典 (21 century bidirectional dictionary)
  • 陳義孝佛學常見辭彙
  • 唯識名詞白話新解
  • 佛光大辭典
  • 三藏法數
  • English-Chinese-English Buddhist dictionary

Japanese dictionaries

  • 4-kanji ideomatic expressions and proverbs
  • Constellation names
  • Buddhism words and phrases
  • Japanese place-names
  • Japanese/English Life Science Dictionary
  • Japanese-English River and Water Resources Glossary

Under DDBC-licence

  • Soothill-Hodous (improved with sanskrit-characters)

Under EBS-license

  • 丁福保: 佛學大辭典 (1922 Ding Fubao: The electronic version of the “Dictionary for Buddhist Studies”)

Under CEDICT-licence

  • CE-Dict (Chinese-English dictionary)
  • HanDeDict (Chinese-Germany)
  • CFDict (Chinese-French)

Public Domain

  • 康熙字典文字版

Translations and shared copyright

The current international copyright law is limited for collaborative translations as all the translators have equal copyright for their translations and are entitled for a share of income in case of translation is published in book form. Therefore if the translation is intended to be published as book or other form the translator initiating the translation needs to state that in the beginning of the translation. One way to make translations without sharing the copyright is to restrict write access to translation. In this way one or more translators can translate whole work and retain all the right strictly to themselves. The discussion pages can have different permissions to allow others still to comment and share ideas for translation work.