Sapphina's Commons
of Humanity

Most everything here is released under creative commons (CC -BY-NC-SA 4.0).

This means that (with a couple of caveats) you can do whatever you want with it. No one owns it*. Specifically we use the attribution non-commercial share-alike licence. Basically you can take them, edit the text, draw a new cover, whatever strikes your fancy; and share them, so long as you attach the same licence to your version too.

Non-commercial means what it says on the tin: don't sell it, don't publish them in a form you sell. Feel free to make a cool physical edition as an art trade (not monetary commission). If you want to sell a small run (<100 copies) of physical prints (of part or a whole story) for a charity or similar fundraiser, you have my blessings to do so.

Attribution just means you got to say where it came from. Ideally a link to the original story's page (every story contains its own link), or the home page. You can repost a story natively to a social media site, so long as you clearly and prominently display a human-readable link back here.

Art and expression are pillars of culture. So many marginalised communities struggle to even meet their most basic survival needs, let alone have surplus resources for paying for art. The notion that someone can be unable to afford their own culture is absolutely absurd. That there should be any price associated with it all, at least for infinitely replicable works like writing, is not what I would ideally wish for either.

But it is not just the cost. These works aren't free simply in terms of not costing anything, but free as in (with a few minor restrictions) just free to do with as you wish. Without needing permission from anyone, because it wasn't artificially enclosed to begin with. No corporate lawyer can stop you, no dollar is worth more than the creative fires you feel.

There are so many cool stories people have made because (typically due to age) the works have come into the public domain. Often ones that are "the original, but..." Pride and Prejudice but it's zombies. Shakespeare with everything at least once. Old myths and legends morphing and changing, even to this day people are reimagining medusa in contexts which they think would be neat. None of this could happen if someone owned these stories, if someone could sue you over doing a half-snake, half-woman "wrong" because they owned the idea.

Even if you're just a reader, it is freer. It can be shared person to person, as one person recommends it to their friend and they simply pass along the file, keeping their own copy. There is no central server which you need to login to, and beg for a copy, assuming you even had all the right email addresses and credit cards and lived in the right country and all the other things required to get into the gated community. No one person can simply shut down the servers one day and annihilate huge swathes of works in a single foul swoop.

This site is not THE source of these works, but just a well spring from which it flows. Every download is like a seed, which can spring into a garden all its own, and give seeds to others, who can do likewise.

As it says at the top of the page, these are works to hold in common, unchained by ownership, free to use and inspire and modify. I can't allow you to put the characters in silly hats, translate them into another language, make them all catgirls, or anything else; because permission is not something you need. All I ask is that you acknowledge everyone whose work you used in your creative endeavour and return it into the commons for yet more to enjoy <3