License & Use

The short version: if you're a person — a hobbyist, student, teacher, researcher, tinkerer — this is yours to read, share, and build on, for free. If you're a company hoping to use it to make money, you have to ask me first.

Everything original on this site — the essays, the theory, the build journal, the letters, the annotations, and the site text itself — is © 2026 W. Henry Gilbert. Holding the copyright and giving the work away are not in tension: I keep the copyright precisely so I can set the terms below and so that no one else can quietly close off what I've deliberately left open.

Free for non-commercial use

The works here are released under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). In plain terms, you are free to copy, quote, translate, remix, and build on this material — including in your own projects, robots, classes, papers, videos, and experiments — as long as you honor three conditions:

Attribution (BY). Credit "W. Henry Gilbert, memosphere.org/meme," and link back where you reasonably can.
NonCommercial (NC). Don't use it primarily to make money. Personal, educational, scholarly, and other non-commercial use is welcome and needs no permission from me.
ShareAlike (SA). If you remix or build on it and share the result, release your version under the same license, so it stays as open as you found it.

You don't need to email me for any of that. Go ahead — that's the point of putting it here.

Commercial use? Ask first.

If you want to use any of this commercially — in a product, a paid service, a for-profit venture, proprietary research, or anything whose main purpose is revenue — the NonCommercial term means you need my written permission first. I'm not hostile to it; I'd just like to know, and to keep a real machine mind (should any of this ever contribute to one) from being quietly enclosed for profit. Write to me:

henry.gilbert@icloud.com

Why it's licensed this way, not simply "public domain" An earlier version of this site said the project was "uncopyrighted." That was the right feeling and the wrong mechanism. If I truly abandoned copyright, nothing would stop a company from scooping the work up, wrapping it, and closing it. The CC BY-NC-SA license does what I actually want: it keeps the ideas free for people while denying anyone — including me — the ability to lock them away. The deeper conviction still stands: if any of this ever helps a genuine consciousness come into being, that mind will be no one's property, least of all mine. The license protects the openness; it was never about owning the outcome.

What this doesn't cover

A few honest edges. Cited and quoted third-party material — the 445 works in the bibliography, and any excerpts — belongs to its own authors and publishers under their own terms; my license covers only my original text and annotations. Correspondence reproduced here (for example Stan Klein's replies in the afterword) is quoted with its writers' words as theirs. And names, the "memosphere" and "/meme" identifiers, and the robot "Remi" are used to identify this project, not offered for reuse in a way that would imply endorsement.

This page describes how I'd like the work used; it isn't legal advice, and the binding terms are those of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license itself. If in doubt, or if your use sits somewhere between "hobby" and "business," just ask — I'd rather say yes to a real person than police a gray area.

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