The Public Record exists to provide journalism for public benefit. We believe our mission is advanced by making sure our content is broadly available to the public.
We exist as part of the open Internet, use open source software, and benefit from the work of those who push for open government. We regularly build upon the work of others.

Creative Commons License

Our contribution back to the open community is to license our own work using the open culture Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Note: work we use from other sites is subject to the source cites license and copyright policy.
CC-BY-SA encourages the use of our work, and for others to improve public knowledge by building on our work.
The license does have some conditions, which are summarized below:

Attribution

  • Credit the work in a manner appropriate to the use. We ask that you please identify our work using the author’s name and “The Public Record”. TPR is acceptable if our full name is mentioned in the accompanying content.
  • We ask that you include a hyperlink to our website, preferably the page of the content you are building upon.

ShareAlike

  • Means you must license derivative works that build upon our content under the same or a less restrictive license. “the same, similar or a compatible license” is the key phrase from the CC license.

CC-BY-SA does not prohibit commercial use. We intentionally do not adopt a non-commercial use restriction to ensure people who choose to adopt open licenses, even if they a revenue stream such a YouTube ads or AdWords, can use our work.

Fair Dealing (Use)

Our CC license does not infringe your fair dealing rights in Canadian copyright law. We strongly support fair dealing in Canadian copyright law, and its essential role in enabling journalists to inform the public.
The Public Record encourages you to exercise your fair dealing rights in using our content. We hope you practice good fair dealing by properly citing when you use our content.
Our views on political use of our content are outlined in a 2017 post entitled Political Ads, Use of Journalistic Content, Fair Use and TPR’s Creative Commons License.
If you have any questions about using our content, please email our editor. (Note, if you are planning to use our content under the terms of our CC-BY-SA license, you don’t have to contact us for permission, the license grants it)