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Copyrights
All information on Erowid.org is provided non-commercially for purposes of teaching, scholarship, research, and criticism. We provide authorship information whenever possible as well as links to original material if it exists on the web. Much of the information has been written by Erowid or approved for inclusion by its author(s). Some excerpts, quotes, and text are used under the fair use doctrine. If you know the author or photographer of an unlabelled writing or photo in our collection, or if we are using writings or photos of yours without permission, please let us know and we'll add credits or remove the piece as you choose.

Requests for permission to use documents or images from Erowid should be sent to copyrights@erowid.org. Please be sure to provide the information requested below in your email.

Trademark
"Erowid" is a registered trademark ® of Erowid.


Requesting Permission to Use Content


Following is a list of types of uses (personal, academic, non-commercial, commercial) and types of information (excerpts, full texts, images) that we are most frequently asked about. It should serve as a guideline for what qualifies as appropriate use of information found in the Vaults. If you meet the requirements, there are certain types of use which do not requre specific permission, but we request that you send us a one or two sentence email letting us know where or how you're using the information.

All html, layout and design for documents found at Erowid are copyright Erowid unless otherwise specified. Please don't copy large portions of Erowid onto your own site...It's not that much to ask :)

The writings and images found at Erowid fall into two categories: those written by Erowid (or used by Erowid with permission of the author), and those used under the fair use doctine without specific permission of the author. You can generally tell whether we hold copyright permission for an article by looking at the author information under the title and also in the bottom right corner of the page you're interested in. It should identify whether the file was created by Erowid and/or whether it is used with or without the permission of the author. If you can't determine which category a piece fits into, send us a quick message and we'll try to help you out.

If the top of the page or the bottom right corner of the page says "used with permission", or "by Erowid", then Erowid holds the copyright on, or has received permission to publish the document from the author. If Erowid holds the copyright on the page or information you are interested in, then the following guidelines should help.


If you are interested in using images which appear in our Image Vaults, the first thing to do is determine who holds the copyright. Many images are specifically labelled in the index as to who is the photographer and who holds the copyright. If there is a link to the original source, please contact the photographer rather than us. If the image is from a book, we cannot give you permission to use it as we do not hold the copyright. If the image is labelled "copyright Erowid", or does not give copyright information, send us an email specifying the URL of the image you're interested in using as well a description of how you would be using the image, and we'll let you know whether or not you can use it.

You can usually tell whether we hold copyright permission for an article by looking in the bottom right corner of the page...it should say "used by Erowid with (or without) permission of the author". Writings such as journal, magazine, and newspaper articles are generally used by us under the fair use doctrine without specific permission of the authors. If the page you are interested in says "used without permission", we do not have the authority to grant you permission to use it.

Most citation styles now include a standard format for web documents. This format can be modified to fit articles by a single author, an anonymous author, or a "corporate" author (such as Erowid itself). See our page on citation formats for examples.