Licensing and Reuse

Last updated: November 9, 2026

Ebykr is made of three kinds of material, and each comes with different rights: our own writing and photographs, one open dataset and the period documents in our archives. This page explains what you may do with each without asking, how to credit Ebykr and how to ask for anything else. The copyright notice at the foot of every page applies to Ebykr’s own work, not to the documents and other third-party material described below. This page puts the content sections of our Terms of Service into plain words; if the two ever differ, the Terms govern. It is general information, not legal advice.

At a glance

Ebykr’s own work

The articles, timelines, guides, translations, descriptions, photographs and graphics created for Ebykr are © Anschutz Media Inc., all rights reserved, unless a page says otherwise. So are the selection and arrangement of the archive and its indexes. These rights cover what Ebykr added; they do not extend to the documents or other third-party material quoted or shown.

You may, without asking:

• read, print or save pages for your own non-commercial use;
• link to any page on Ebykr;
• quote short passages, with credit to Ebykr and a link to the page.

Please ask first before you:

• republish an article or a large part of one anywhere, including a club newsletter, a forum or social media;
• translate an article;
• use one of Ebykr’s photographs or graphics;
• use our material in a book, magazine, video, product or commercial website.

Individual facts are free. Copyright protects the way we wrote something, not the facts in it. You may state a founding date, a model name, a catalog price or a serial-number range that you learned on Ebykr in your own words, and a credit is always appreciated. This does not extend to copying our tables or collecting facts from Ebykr in bulk, which section 4 of our Terms of Service covers.

Images

The images in Ebykr’s articles and on our Images pages come from many places. Some are our own photographs. Many are pages from period catalogs and advertisements, and others are photographs from other sources. Only our own photographs are ours to license.

• A caption that credits another source means the image is not ours to license. Where a caption names an open license, that license applies to the image and you must follow its terms.
• Not every image carries a credit, and a missing credit does not mean an image is ours or free to use. If you are unsure, ask us about the specific image.
• We can give permission only for images we own. For an old catalog page or advertisement, we can share what we know of its history, but we cannot promise its status. For a press or agency photograph, please contact the agency.

Open data: the Serial Registry

The data in the Serial Registry is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0). In short, you may copy, share and adapt the data for non-commercial purposes, as long as you:

• credit Ebykr and link to the registry page;
• link to the license;
• say whether you changed the data.

The license itself has the full terms. For commercial use, ask us.

The license covers the registry’s data, such as the maker, model, year, type, country, condition and serial number as displayed. It does not cover photographs shown with an entry or anything we have not published: a serial number shown only in part stays that way.

Entries are logged by contributors, who keep ownership of them and grant Ebykr the license described in our Terms of Service. We license the registry only to the extent of the rights we hold.

Other reference material. The Tech Specs build sheets, the timelines, the saddle model guides and Ebykr’s other reference tables are not openly licensed; they fall under Ebykr’s own work above. If you have a project that needs them, write to us.

Archive documents

The Catalog, Advertisement, Poster and Covers archives hold documents that Ebykr did not create and does not own. Ebykr presents them for research and education. We claim no ownership of the documents or of the words printed in them, including where we have transcribed those words, and we grant no license to them.

Each record names the Publisher of the document and the Source of its scan wherever we know them. We do not label each document’s copyright status, and nothing on Ebykr is a promise about it. In general, a document falls into one or more of these situations:

• No longer protected. Many of the older documents are in the public domain, but the rules differ from country to country and can turn on the date of publication or the date of an artist’s death. A document that is free in one country can be protected in another, even where a library marks it as public domain.
• Still protected. Many later documents remain protected. The rights may belong to the original firm, a successor or an artist’s estate, whether or not we have been able to identify them. We present them for research and education and review any request from a rights holder promptly.
• From a library or museum. Many scans come from national libraries and museums, and some of these set their own conditions on reuse. The Bibliothèque nationale de France, for example, allows free non-commercial reuse of Gallica content with a source credit and charges for commercial reuse. Check the terms of the institution named on the record.
• Scanned by a collector or an archive site. Many scans were made by collectors, clubs and archive sites, and we credit them on the record. They made the scans; the rights in a document usually belong to its publisher.
• Shown by permission. Some collections appear by permission of the people who own or made the scans, and the record credits them. That permission was given to Ebykr and does not pass to anyone else.
• Under an open license. A few scans are published under an open license, such as a Creative Commons license. The record names that license, and its terms govern any reuse of those scans. Some of these licenses forbid commercial use or changes.

What this means for you. Ebykr cannot give you permission to reuse an archive document, and any reuse is your responsibility. Read its record first: it tells you who published the document, where the scan came from and whether a license applies. Our descriptions and translations of the documents are Ebykr’s own work, covered above.

What you contribute

Comments, forum posts, Serial Registry entries, Submit Your Bike entries and Docs Drop uploads remain yours. When you contribute, you grant Ebykr the license described in section 5 of our Terms of Service and you confirm that you have the right to share what you send. In practice we apply open licenses only to factual information drawn from contributions, such as the Serial Registry data; your photographs and scans stay outside them. We credit published contributions as you choose: your name, a handle or no name at all.

Automated access and AI tools

Search engines, AI assistants and other automated tools may read Ebykr only as our robots.txt file permits and only at a pace that does not burden the site. When an assistant answers from an Ebykr page, we ask that it cite the page with a link.

Reading a page is not a license to reuse it. Copying, mirroring or republishing Ebykr’s articles, photographs, transcriptions or archive images in bulk, or building a collection or database from them, needs our written permission, except where a license on a page allows it, as the Serial Registry’s does for non-commercial use. Nothing on this page grants a license to train AI models on Ebykr’s content. Section 4 of our Terms of Service has the details.

How to credit Ebykr

Online, a link to the page is part of the credit. A credit does not replace permission where permission is needed. Suggested forms:

• An article: Ebykr, “[Article title],” ebykr.com/[page address]
• The Serial Registry: Source: Ebykr Serial Registry (ebykr.com/serial-numbers/), CC BY-NC 4.0
• An archive scan: [Maker] [type of document], [year], [scan credit from the record], via ebykr.com. For example: Bianchi catalog, 1912, via ebykr.com
• A photograph we have licensed to you: Photo: Ebykr (ebykr.com)

Asking for permission

Write to eabykr@gmail.com or use our contact form. Tell us:

• what you would like to use, with a link to each page or image;
• where and how it will appear, such as a book, magazine, club newsletter, website or video;
• whether the use is commercial.

Permission must be in writing and covers only the use it names. We are glad to hear from clubs, authors, editors, museums and researchers, but we cannot promise a reply or permission.

Corrections and rights issues

If you hold the rights to something on Ebykr, including an archive document, or believe a credit is wrong, email eabykr@gmail.com with the subject “Rights issue” or use our contact form. We review every notice and remove or correct material where appropriate. Section 10 of our Terms of Service explains what to include.