Where our texts come from

Tales Across publishes two kinds of writing, and they are not the same thing. The published editions are complete works whose copyright has expired, reproduced word for word and unaltered. The retold classics are our own present-day tellings of public-domain stories, written from scratch. This page says exactly which is which, where every text comes from, and how we can prove it.

What the public domain is

Copyright does not last forever. After a work has been protected for a set period, it becomes everyone's: it may be read, printed, translated and adapted freely, with no permission and no royalty, commercial use included. In Hungary and the European Union that period is 70 years after the author's death (Art. 31 of Act LXXVI of 1999 on copyright).

The rule we work by

Hungarian law alone is not enough for us, because this site runs on a US advertising system and is read worldwide. In the United States the term for older works is tied not to the author's death but to the year of publication: 95 years. So a work can only appear here if both conditions hold at once:

• the author — and every contributor: translator, illustrator, editor — died in 1955 or earlier;
• the specific work was first published in 1930 or earlier.

That rule is deliberately stricter than Hungarian law requires. Where the two disagree, the narrower one wins — and when we are unsure, we leave the work alone.

Why we do not rewrite, and never paraphrase

The older texts on this site are reproduced exactly. We do not abridge them, modernise the spelling, translate them, or paraphrase them — partly because a paraphrase of a living work is a derivative work and needs permission, and partly because even for public-domain texts a light rewrite is the worst of both worlds: it destroys the original without creating anything of our own.

Google's spam policies take the same view, and say so explicitly: copying content and changing it only slightly — “for example, by substituting synonyms or using automated techniques” — is named as an abusive pattern. What those policies do require is that republished material comes with “additional commentary, curation, or otherwise adding value”. That is the layer described below, and it is the reason this page exists.

Which edition, and how we can prove it

A public-domain novel still has to come from somewhere, and the edition matters: a modern translation, a new set of illustrations and a scholar's introduction each carry their own copyright, even when the underlying text is free. Every published edition on this site therefore records four things:

• the edition used — where the text came from and under what licence; we use Standard Ebooks, whose transcriptions are released under CC0, meaning the files may be reused freely, commercially and without attribution;
• the exact revision — a commit identifier, so the source can be fetched again and compared;
• a fingerprint — a SHA-256 hash of every chapter and of the work as a whole. Our build recomputes it and refuses to publish if a single word does not match what we recorded;
• the copyright status of the work itself — the author's year of death and the year of first publication, with the year the work entered the public domain in the EU and in the US.

The upshot is that “we did not change anything” is not a claim here, it is a measurement that runs on every build.

What we add

Every published edition carries an editorial layer written by us: an introduction, a note on the author, the publication history, a glossary of the period vocabulary that a modern reader is most likely to misread, and a reading guide. On each work page we say plainly which part is the original and which part is ours.

We also choose what to publish, and how to arrange it. The themes on this site are not arbitrary: they follow the subjects that dominate the books people are actually buying now, measured from the weekly best-seller lists of the past four months. The works collected under a theme are the ones that stand behind it.

How we credit authors

Under Article 14(2) of the Hungarian Copyright Act an author must be credited as the author even after the copyright term has expired. Every published edition names the author, the year of death, the original title and the year of first publication, and adds the same data to the page's machine-readable metadata.

What we do not use

• modern translations (the translator holds a separate copyright);
• re-illustrated contemporary editions (the artwork is a separate work);
• the notes, introductions and afterwords of scholarly editions;
• manuscripts first published long after the author's death;
• sources that are public domain only in Canada or Australia;
• texts released under CC BY-SA / NC / ND — share-alike and non-commercial terms are incompatible with what we do here;
• any text we cannot trace to a dated first publication.

The register

Both tables below are generated from the site's own content register, so they always show exactly what is published. Nothing here is maintained by hand.

Published editions — complete texts, unaltered

Retold classics — our own telling

These are short stories: the plot, the motifs and the structure come from the original, and the prose is entirely ours. No borrowed sentences, and none of the original edition's editorial apparatus.

If you object

If you believe one of our publications still infringes your copyright, or the author's memory, write to hello@talesacross.com. We will not argue: the text you object to comes down immediately, and if needed we correct the source register as well. The same applies whenever a year of death or a year of first publication turns out to have been wrong.

The detailed source inventory — legal framework, verified author lists and the common pitfalls — lives in the site's internal documentation and is the basis of every claim on this page. This page is not legal advice.