You keep the copyright in everything you write. You always will.
Nothing here is an assignment. You are not signing your work over. You can publish the same review, the same essay, the same photograph anywhere else, any time, without asking us.
Facts go into the public domain
Titles, dates, casts, catalogue numbers, labels, track listings, the link between a recording and the production it documents — you release these under CC0 1.0, including any database rights you may hold.
Facts about recordings should belong to everyone. Under Feist v. Rural most of this was never anyone's property to begin with, so CC0 mostly declares out loud what is already true. What it adds is certainty — for us, for you, and for whoever builds something on top of this in ten years. It is also what lets the catalogue publish an open API, and it is how MusicBrainz and Discogs handle the same material.
The database-rights clause is not boilerplate. The EU's sui generis database right (Directive 96/9/EC) attaches to makers who are EU nationals or residents, so a German or Hungarian contributor may hold a right a contributor in Ohio does not. CC0 covers it explicitly. A plain copyright licence would not.
Anything you write stays yours, and you lend it to us
Reviews, essays, historical notes, transcriptions you made, photographs you took. You grant us a licence that is perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive and royalty-free, to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, sublicense and transfer your contribution as part of this catalogue.
Why sublicense and transfer
So this outlives whoever is running it. Catalogues like this one have died because no single person could give anyone else permission to keep them going — the volunteers were identified by a username, the founder moved on, and nobody had standing to sign anything.
Those two words are what let this catalogue be donated to a library, partnered with a museum, or carried on by someone else, without tracking down every contributor first. It is not a plan to sell your reviews. It is how the work survives you and us both.
What you promise
That it is your own work. That you have the right to contribute it. That you are not copying it out of another database or another website — which matters more here than it sounds, because the whole value of this catalogue is that it was not scraped from anywhere.
Where a moral right cannot be waived — France and Germany, most notably — you agree not to assert it against ordinary editorial use: correcting a typo, cutting a paragraph, laying your text out differently.
What we promise
Your name stays on your contributions, in a public edit history anyone can read, at /changes and on your own page. We will never quietly take your credit off your work.
And if you want it removed, ask, and we will detach it. The contributions themselves stay. They are part of the record now, and other people's corrections are built on top of them — but the name comes off, and what is left reads as an anonymous contributor.
Every fact stays free. If this catalogue ever moves into new hands, these terms move with it — the next owner gets exactly the rights described above and not one more.
And when we turn something down, we say why, in writing, on the page.
What is public, and for how long
Everything you contribute is public the moment it is submitted: the value you propose, the source you cite, what you wrote about it, and the name on your account, together, on a page anybody can read and search engines can index. Not after review — immediately, in the record of changes.
That is the attribution promised above, and it is the reason this catalogue can be trusted. It is also permanent in practice. Assume anything you contribute is there for good, and see the privacy policy for what you can ask us to remove.