License

Everything on this site is free to copy, print, share, translate, and adapt.

The short version

You can:

• Print a cairn and hand it to anyone.
• Photocopy it, fax it, mail it.
• Forward it in a group chat or post it on a bulletin board.
• Translate it into another language.
• Quote from it in your own work.
• Adapt it for a specific community — a clinic, a school, a church, a mutual-aid group, a workplace, a town.
• Republish it on your own site, in a newsletter, in a printed pamphlet, in a book.

You don't need to ask. You don't need to pay. You don't need to attribute us, though it helps the next reader find more cairns if you do.

The only two conditions are:

• Credit, if you can. A line like From The Cairn Society — cairnsociety.org at the bottom is enough. If you've adapted it, please say so — for example, Adapted from The Cairn Society.
• Same license forward. If you publish your version, your version stays free for others under the same terms. Open work stays open.

What this means in plain terms

This work is published under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. BY means credit when you can. SA stands for share alike — your version of the work has to remain free to share and adapt, the same way ours is.

This is the same license Wikipedia uses. It is one of the most permissive licenses in serious use, and it's chosen here for a specific reason: we want this work to travel further than we can carry it. A librarian, a translator, a hospice volunteer, a pastor, a community-health worker, a neighborhood association, a foreign-language press — all of them should be able to take a cairn and use it without asking us first. They usually don't have time to ask.

What about commercial use

Allowed. If a clinic, a publisher, a county agency, or a small business wants to print and distribute one of these cairns to people they serve, that's fine. The same-license condition applies — they can't lock the work behind a paywall or claim it as proprietary.

What we ask, beyond the license

Nothing legally binding, but if you adapt a cairn for safety-critical use — for example, customizing the medical-device contact instructions for a specific clinic's patients, or translating the food-safety windows for a specific community — please make sure the factual claims are still accurate after your adaptation. The four-hour and forty-eight-hour windows, the carbon-monoxide rules, and similar specifics should not drift in translation. If in doubt, check against the source notes.

Anything else

The full legal text of the license is at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode. If you have a specific question about a particular use, you're welcome to get in touch, but you don't have to.