Intellectual property and content use

What Material World does not claim

Not the facts. A melting point is a measurement of the world. Quartz being 7 on the Mohs scale is not ours and never could be, and quoting it here needs no permission from us.

Not our sources’ material. This site draws on Wikidata, PubChem, NIST, the Crystallography Open Database and others. Each carries its own terms, each is listed on data sources with its licence position, and nothing on this page grants rights over any of them. Where a licence is unestablished we say so, and that claim is withheld rather than published.

What is ours

The editorial writing — the summaries, the explanations of why a material behaves as it does, the reasoning on the methodology pages. And the way it is all put together: how the material is organised, how the connections between things are defined, how evidence is weighed and rated, which comparisons are offered and what is allowed in at all — and the collection as a whole. That is the work, and it is what copyright and database rights attach to.

What you may do without asking

Read it, bookmark it, print it, and quote it. Cite a figure with attribution, link to any page, use what you learn here in your own work. Search engines may index it within the published robots policy.

Suggested attribution: Source: Material World, operated by HEKNO Ltd, [page title], [access date].

What needs a conversation first

Systematically extracting this collection, mirroring it, building a competing database from it, redistributing its structure or the connections between entries, or using it to train or ground a model. Not because the answer is no — for research and non-commercial work it is usually yes — but because those uses take the compilation rather than a fact, and the compilation is the part that took the work.

Ask licensing@hekno.co.uk. Say what you want, what for, and at what scale.

Ownership and scope

Unless stated otherwise, HEKNO or its licensors own or control applicable rights in original text, editorial work, software, designs, illustrations, photographs, graphics, calculators, documentation and other protected material. Structured assets may include databases, taxonomies, ontologies, knowledge graphs, canonical identifiers, classifications, relationships, mappings, metadata, source-selection systems, confidence frameworks, recommendations and compilations.

HEKNO does not claim ownership of facts as such, public-domain material or third-party rights. Copyright may protect original expression, software, design and qualifying selection or arrangement. Separate database rights may protect qualifying investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting database contents.

Permitted ordinary use

You may browse, bookmark and use public services lawfully; print a reasonable number of pages for personal reference; quote limited extracts where permitted by law with appropriate attribution; and use material under an express licence according to that licence.

Permission required

Unless applicable law expressly permits it, written permission is required to reproduce substantial content; systematically extract, harvest, scrape, crawl or mirror content or data; repeatedly extract insubstantial parts in a way that conflicts with normal exploitation; create or enrich competing databases or knowledge services; redistribute datasets, taxonomies, mappings or metadata; commercially exploit HEKNO material; remove provenance or rights notices; or use protected content in model training, fine-tuning, evaluation corpora, embeddings, retrieval systems or synthetic-dataset generation.

AI and text or data mining

HEKNO does not grant a general licence for commercial AI training or competing data products. This policy does not override mandatory legal exceptions, and anyone relying on an exception is responsible for satisfying every condition. Public page access does not itself grant a commercial training or extraction licence.

Permission to index does not automatically authorise bulk republication, dataset creation, generative substitution, commercial training or circumvention. Attribution does not cure unauthorised copying.

Permission requests

Contact licensing@hekno.co.uk with the material, intended use, audience, territory, commercial status, format, volume, duration, attribution and any AI or data-mining involvement.