Licensing and rights
How rights are classified, what each status means, and what this catalogue will never claim for you.
The statuses
Cleared
A licence was read from the source itself and recorded, and that licence permits the use being made of it. Cleared applies to a specific example, never to a possibility in the abstract.
Attribution required
Use is permitted provided the recorded attribution is reproduced. The attribution text is stored with the example so it travels with the asset.
Review required
Something was detected but not understood well enough to rely on: a licence file that contradicts the repository, a licence that changed at a tag, a non-commercial or share-alike restriction whose scope is unclear.
Reference only
No licence was found, or the material is explicitly not licensed for reuse. The example is preserved because it demonstrates a real possibility. That is the entire extent of its permission.
What this will not do
Repository licence metadata is treated as a hint, never as the sole authority. Unknown material is never described as cleared. Transforming an asset with an AI tool does not clear it. Possibility discovery does not grant rights to the source asset, and none of the plates here are a substitute for reading a licence.
If something here is wrong
Corrections are auditable and take effect on the record rather than on the asset. Content addressing means a licence can be corrected without touching the bytes, and the previous classification is kept rather than overwritten.