Licensing

All iFixit content is licensed under the open source Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

Original Author

Materials you submit to iFixit must be from one of three sources:

1. Content you own the copyright to because you produced it yourself.
2. Content that is in the public domain.
3. Content that is licensed under a compatible open source license.

When you submit content to iFixit, you retain full copyright to your materials, and you can use your content in any way you like, including using it for commercial purposes and distributing it to other sites.

By submitting content to http://www.ifixit.com, you give iFixit nonexclusive rights to republish and relicense the work. iFixit may use the material and can license it to other parties without prior consent from the original author.

Press

Without specific permission, members of the press may use three teardown photos per story with attribution. More generous press licensing is easily obtainable by emailing kyle at ifixit dot com.

Everyone

We license all teardowns and repair manuals under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike license. Everyone is free to republish, share, and remix our manuals as long as they attribute the source link, use it for a noncommercial purpose, and distribute any modifications of the work under a similar license.

FAQ

What’s Creative Commons?

The Creative Commons organization was created by Lawrence Lessig, a legal scholar (and long-time iFixit user!) who solved the need to provide a flexible open content licensing in situations like ours, where we want our content to be as free as possible.

What if I want to improve your guides?

You are welcome to copy them elsewhere and modify them, but the improvements will reach more people if we pool our efforts. We will be allowing anyone to edit and improve our repair manuals on iFixit.com very soon.

Can I translate your manuals into (Spanish, German, etc.)?

You would not believe how often we get offers to translate our repair manuals. There is a huge pent-up demand for localized repair documentation. We plan to make that happen. Our repair manual framework has built-in internationalization support, but it’s not quite done yet. To be honest, it probably won’t be done until at least the end of 2010. In the meantime, there are three things you can do:

1. Translate our manuals and post them on your site. You can do this right now, and as long as you comply with the attribution and noncommercial aspects of the license, you’re free to do whatever you like.
2. Sign up to be a translator. We’ll be pulling people from this list to alpha-test our internationalization platform.
3. Promote iFixit inside your country / region. The more demand we have for a given language, the sooner we will be able to support it.

Why do you restrict commercial use?

We admit it — we have to pay the bills. Selling parts is how we do that. We want to be able to afford to write new manuals, and the noncommercial requirement allows us to do that. We frequently grant usage licenses to commercial entities, so contact us with any inquiries.

What’s the licensing for journalists?

The Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license does not have specific support for journalists, but we are very willing to freely license our content to journalists. Reporters are free to use up to three attributed photos per story without contacting us. More generous licensing is readily available by contacting us, and we are almost always willing to grant journalists the same rights as noncommercial users.