Licences and rights

This project's preservation aim does not override anyone's copyright.

The basis for what is archived

Everything archived here in full comes from editions published before 1929 and therefore in the public domain in the United States: the Ante-Nicene Fathers (1885 to 1887), the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers in both series (1886 to 1900), and Percival's edition of the seven ecumenical councils (1900).

Each archived file records its edition, its rights status and the basis for that status, the source it was transcribed from, the date it was accessioned, and a SHA-256 checksum of the stored text. Those records are in the archive manifests, and their contents are summarised below.

What this project will not do

• Reproduce a modern copyrighted translation. Nothing from OCA, GOARCH, St Vladimir's Seminary Press, St Tikhon's Monastery Press, Popular Patristics or any commercial Bible edition is reproduced here.
• Treat an ancient work as public domain because it is ancient. A modern translation of a fourth-century text is a modern work.
• Scrape or mirror an official Orthodox site because it is publicly reachable. Where rights are unclear the practice is to summarise and link.
• Silently correct a source text. Where a reading copy would differ from the transcription, both are kept and the difference stated.
• Present an AI-generated image as an icon, a manuscript, an artefact or a historical portrait. This site uses geometric and architectural ornament that cannot be mistaken for a liturgical icon.
• Archive machine-translated text. The extraction pipeline refuses any working file whose provenance does not name a public-domain edition, and it refused one work during the initial build.

Scripture

This site does not reproduce a modern copyrighted Bible translation. Scripture references are given so that you can read the passage in the translation your parish uses.

This project's own text

The editorial prose, schemas, templates and build scripts written for this project are in the repository and are covered by the terms stated there. The archived source texts are public domain and remain so; nothing this project has done to them creates a new restriction on them.

What is archived, and on what basis