Content Rights, Fair Use, and Availability Policy

Scope and intended use

This policy covers poem text, snippets, metadata, and AI-generated contextual text shown by Poetry Cove.

Poetry Cove is intended for personal learning, research, and non-commercial exploration.

• Poem text where available.
• Poem snippets or excerpts.
• Title/author/source metadata.
• Explanatory or contextual text generated by Poetry Cove.

Current source corpus

Poetry Cove currently uses the PoeTree corpus, the DBNL public-domain Dutch poetry archive (dbnl.org, CC0-1.0), and the Project Gutenberg English archive, together covering twelve languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, and Spanish.

Poetry Cove relies on source corpus rights/provenance context and also applies additional jurisdiction-specific compliance checks.

Poetry Cove may add or remove data sources over time. If source coverage materially changes, this policy may be updated.

Rights basis and jurisdiction

For supported public-domain jurisdictions, Poetry Cove applies a life-of-author-plus-70-years baseline framework unless stricter local law applies.

Poetry Cove seeks to make available only content that is public domain in relevant jurisdictions or otherwise lawfully permitted for use.

Because copyright terms differ by country, availability decisions may differ by jurisdiction.

Operational publication safeguard

As a conservative safeguard, Poetry Cove generally limits full-poem availability to authors with verified death on or before 31 December 1955 unless another lawful basis is documented.

• Where rights status is ambiguous or evidence is incomplete, Poetry Cove may withhold full text.
• Poetry Cove may show metadata only or show limited snippets.
• Poetry Cove may temporarily remove a work pending review.

Provenance and internal review

To support rights governance, Poetry Cove maintains internal provenance and rights metadata for compliance and auditability, which is not always fully displayed in the user interface.

• Source identifiers and source links.
• Rights rationale and country-specific availability context.
• Confidence/review flags for ambiguous records.

Fair use and fair dealing context

Nothing in this policy creates or expands statutory exceptions such as fair use or fair dealing.

Whether a use qualifies depends on the law in your jurisdiction and your specific facts.

Users are responsible for assessing their own legal basis before republishing, distributing, or commercially using any content or output.

Permitted and prohibited use

• Users may read, research, and quote limited portions where lawful and with proper attribution.
• Users must not republish substantial collections, remove attribution, or use content in infringing ways.
• Nothing here creates or expands statutory fair use/fair dealing rights; users are responsible for their own legal basis.

You are responsible for verifying downstream reuse rights in your own jurisdiction and use case.

AI-generated text and rights

AI-generated explanations, summaries, and contextual text provided by Poetry Cove are for informational use and do not constitute a grant of copyright permission or a legal determination of rights status.

Poetry Cove does not guarantee that AI-generated text is non-infringing in every jurisdiction or use context.

Takedown and rights concerns

If you believe content on Poetry Cove infringes copyright or related rights, contact hello [at] poetry-cove [dot] com.

Please include identification of the work in question, URL(s) or sufficient information to locate the material, basis of your claim and jurisdiction, and your contact details and authority to act if acting for a rightsholder.

Poetry Cove reviews notices in good faith and may remove or restrict access while a claim is assessed.

Attribution and citation

Poetry Cove follows PoeTree citation guidance and attributes PoeTree as a primary corpus source. Dutch poetry is sourced from the DBNL (Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren), licensed CC0-1.0. English public-domain poetry is also sourced from Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org).

PoeTree citation source: https://versologie.cz/poetree/cite

• PoeTree dataset DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10008458
• PoeTree article DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/24523666-bja10044
• DBNL source: https://dbnl.org (CC0-1.0)
• Project Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org (public domain)

User-created anthologies and shared collections

DRAFT — pending owner review. The clauses in this section describe how the Harbour anthologies feature relates to content rights and are provided for review before publication.

Signed-in users may create "Anthologies" — named collections that arrange references to works already present in Poetry Cove's corpus. An Anthology is an arrangement of references plus a small amount of user-provided text (such as a collection name and description). The poems an Anthology points to are the same public-domain or otherwise lawfully-included works covered by this policy; an Anthology does not introduce new content sources and does not change the rights status of the underlying works.

Because Anthologies reference corpus works rather than republish them, the rights basis, jurisdiction limits, and operational publication safeguards described above continue to apply to any poem text displayed through an Anthology. Where a work is later restricted or removed for rights reasons, it may stop being shown within an Anthology that references it, even on a shared page.

Curating, naming, or sharing an Anthology does not grant the curator or any viewer ownership of, or additional rights in, the referenced works, the corpus, or Poetry Cove's compilation. Users remain responsible for assessing their own legal basis before republishing, distributing, or commercially using any work surfaced through an Anthology, exactly as for any other content on Poetry Cove.

When a user enables sharing for an Anthology, the page may display the curator's chosen profile display name (for example, a first name or pen name) to identify who assembled the collection. This identification refers only to the act of curation and arrangement; it does not assert authorship of, or rights in, the referenced public-domain works.

No legal advice

This policy describes Poetry Cove's operational approach and is not legal advice.

Changes to this policy

Poetry Cove may update this policy from time to time to reflect legal, operational, or product changes.

The latest version will be posted at this policy URL with an updated Last updated date.