Public Review Draft — Not Yet Effective This document is published for public consultation and product-governance review. It does not yet govern the use of Langa Library and is not the final statement of Langa Library's legal or data practices. Product behavior, retention periods, vendors, and feature-specific disclosures remain subject to verification. Send comments to langalibrary.dev@gmail.com. Do not submit passwords, private book files, payment-card details, identity documents, or sensitive personal information.

Copyright & Rights Policy

Langa Library supports discovery, study, preservation, and lawful access while respecting authors, translators, artists, publishers, researchers, digitizers, contributors, and other rights holders.

1. Key principles

Access does not equal ownership. Different elements of one edition may have different rights. Public-domain status varies by jurisdiction. Preservation does not erase copyright, privacy, confidentiality, attribution, cultural sensitivity, database, contract, trademark, or personality rights. Rights metadata can be wrong and must be correctable.

2. Material categories

The Services may include bibliographic facts, original descriptions, database structures, covers, public-domain texts, licensed texts, quotations, reviews, user files, community covers, translations, links, thumbnails, indexes, OCR, and accessibility derivatives. Each category has different conditions.

3. Metadata and databases

Individual facts may receive different protection from creative descriptions, selection, arrangement, or a substantial database. Users may not systematically extract or republish substantial protected portions without authorization or another lawful basis.

4. Public-domain assessment

Assessment may consider author death date, publication date and place, anonymity, renewal or extension, edition-specific material, translation, illustration, introduction, cover, typography, restoration, and the country of use. A Langa label is informational, not a universal legal guarantee.

The underlying work may be public domain while a modern translation, introduction, notes, illustration, cover, or digital restoration remains protected.

5. Licensed material

Material may be available under direct permission, an open license, a Creative Commons license, a publisher or archive agreement, or contributor terms. Users must comply with attribution, non-commercial, share-alike, no-derivatives, territorial, access, and other conditions.

6. Cover images

Commercial covers often contain protected art, photography, typography, and branding. Langa Library should display a cover only when licensed, permitted, public domain, supplied by an authorized provider, created by Langa, or contributed under valid terms. Public visibility on another website is not permission to scrape and republish.

When no lawful cover is available, use a neutral placeholder, text-based generated cover, rights-cleared public-domain design, or original community cover.

7. Community covers

Community covers must be original or use properly licensed components, avoid copying commercial designs, identify sources, disclose AI assistance where required, and be labeled as independent community interpretations rather than official publisher editions.

8. Private uploads

Users must have a lawful basis to possess, upload, store, translate, and process files. MyBook must not be used to create a piracy library, distribute unauthorized copies, share access to bypass restrictions, remove DRM, or operate a commercial distribution service.

9. Quotations and commentary

Quotations should be relevant, no longer than reasonably necessary, attributed, and used lawfully. Review, educational, or non-commercial context does not automatically make every reproduction lawful.

10. Translations

A translation may be independently protected even when the source work is public domain. Contributors must confirm the source may lawfully be translated and that their translation is original. Machine assistance does not remove copyright obligations.

11. Prohibited conduct

Piracy, copied covers, concealed plagiarism, forged permissions, false ownership claims, removal of rights information, circumvention, substantial unauthorized database copying, and knowingly false rights complaints are prohibited.

12. Rights notice

Send a notice to langalibrary.team@gmail.com with:

1. reporter identity and contact;
2. identification of the protected work or right;
3. exact location of the material;
4. basis of the claim and relationship to the right;
5. supporting evidence reasonably available;
6. requested action; and
7. a good-faith accuracy statement.

Do not include unnecessary sensitive information.

13. Review process

We may acknowledge, request evidence, temporarily restrict, investigate sources, contact the contributor, correct attribution or metadata, add a status warning, remove access, reject an unsupported claim, preserve records, or obtain professional advice. The response depends on evidence, urgency, jurisdiction, and potential harm.

14. Contributor response

Where appropriate, the affected contributor may respond with evidence of ownership, permission, license, public-domain status, or another lawful basis. We may restore, modify, continue restricting, or permanently remove the material.

15. Repeat infringement

Repeated or serious infringement can result in feature restriction or account termination. We will distinguish good-faith uncertainty from deliberate piracy or fraud where reasonably possible.

16. Other rights

The same reporting route may be used for trademark, attribution and moral rights, privacy, likeness, confidentiality, cultural heritage, traditional cultural expressions, database rights, contract, or defamation concerns.

17. No final legal determination

An operational decision by Langa Library is not a court judgment and does not finally determine ownership. Complex disputes may require negotiation, mediation, an authority, or a court.