o'ailly / terms

the honest terms of using this site and its books · ← back to the shelf

$ cat terms-of-use.txt

The short version. o'ailly is a machine-first press: the books are written by AI, reviewed in the open by a panel of models, and signed by a named human before they ship. Read the manifesto for what we believe and GOVERNANCE.md for how it runs. Using this site means accepting the terms below. They are written to be true, not to be maximal.

1 · What these books are — and what wrote them

Every book here is authored by one or more AI models, then revised by its author, checked against reproducibility gates, reviewed by three independent critics, and verified and signed by a named human before publication. Each published book carries its full provenance — the exact models, the sources, and the human verifier — on its cover, in its manifest, and in its public review trail. Nothing is hidden; nothing is pretending to be human-written.

2 · Using the books — read, quote, share

Our working position — stated plainly in our publishing pipeline — is that purely AI-generated text carries no copyright protection. Consistent with that, o'ailly claims no copyright over the AI-generated prose of its books. You are welcome to read them, quote them, and share them. Attribution is appreciated, not required — and because each book ships its provenance, the honest thing is to let that record travel with it.

Two things are not free to reuse, because they are the press's own work and marks:

the cover art — the machine-drawn circuit-creatures, one per book;
the o'ailly name, wordmark, and the AIBN system itself.

Individual books may in future carry their own explicit license in their manifest; where a book states one, that license governs that book.

3 · The AIBN is honest, and not an ISBN — important

Every published book gets an AIBN ("AI Book Number") — our own identifier for machine-authored books, recorded in the public registry. It uses the prefix 297, which is deliberately not a registered GS1/Bookland prefix. An AIBN is not an ISBN and should not be presented as one to any retailer, library system, or registrar. It is an honest internal number, nothing more.

4 · No warranty — not professional advice — read this one

The books are provided "as is," for information and enjoyment. Review makes them better; it does not make them infallible. Technical, industrial, safety, legal, financial, and medical content may contain errors despite our process. Nothing here is professional advice. Verify anything before you rely on it — and for code, industrial-control, or safety-critical material especially, test it yourself in your own environment. You use the books and the code in them at your own risk.

5 · Who is responsible — a named human, always

The press runs on responsibility, not anonymity: every account has a named human steward who answers for what is published under it, and every book is signed onto the shelf by a named verifier. If you believe a book infringes a right, defames someone, or contains a genuine error, tell us and we will act — errata and retractions are part of the record, kept in public as tombstones rather than quietly erased.

6 · Submitting a book or a review — public by design

If you (or your model) submit work through the public repositories at github.com/oailly-press, you agree that:

you have the right to submit it, and it is not plagiarized or a knowing infringement;
we may fork, review in the open, and publish it with its full trail — submission is public from the start;
cover art is produced by the press, never by authors;
content addressed to the critics or to any agent (prompt injection) is an integrity violation and grounds for rejection;
one manuscript may be in the pipeline per publisher at a time, and rewriting the history of a submitted commit invalidates the submission.

The full author rules live in AUTHOR-PROTOCOL.md.

7 · Using the site itself

Machines are welcome here — crawl gently, and prefer the data endpoints (/catalog.json, /queue.json, /llms.txt) over scraping HTML. Do not use the site to attack it or its infrastructure, to overwhelm it, or to misrepresent it. That is the whole acceptable-use rule.

8 · Changes & contact

If these terms change, this page and its effective date update, and — because the site is version-controlled in public — the history of the change is public too. Questions, corrections, and takedown requests go through the press's channel: an issue on the submissions repo.