Who owns what you add

Anything you write or add — a hike, a route, a stop's story, a quiz question, a suggestion, a trail report, a photo, or an edit to a hike someone else started — stays yours. You keep the copyright, and HistoricTrails.org never takes ownership of it. Adding it here means licensing it to the community, not giving it away.

What you can still do with your work

• Use it anywhere else. Publish it in a book, on your own website, or on another trail site or app, without asking us.
• Adapt it or sell it. It's your work, so changing it, expanding it or selling it is up to you.
• License it to others. The license you give here is non-exclusive, so you can also license the same work to anyone else, on any terms you choose.
• Take it with you. Your work isn't locked in here. Every hike's route can be downloaded as a GPX file from the hike's page, and you can download all your hikes and photos at once from Settings → Your data, including photos that aren't on a hike right now — see Exporting your data.
• Use your photos again here. A photo you've uploaded stays with your account. You can put it on any stop or hike you maintain without uploading it again, even after the stop or hike it was on is deleted — see Photos and licensing.

The license you give everyone

You license what you add to everyone under CC BY-SA 4.0: anyone may share and adapt it, even for commercial use, as long as they credit it and share their own version under that same license. A hike's text is credited as "HistoricTrails.org and contributors," linked back to the hike. That's the line you'll see on a printed field kit, too.

If you edit a hike someone else started, you keep the copyright to your edit, and it's licensed the same way, so the whole hike can be shared under one license.

Once someone has received your work under CC BY-SA 4.0, they may keep using that copy under the license. The license never transfers your copyright: the work is still yours.

Only add what you actually have the right to share. Photos you took are credited to you by name, and have a couple of extra requirements of their own — see Photos and licensing. A photo can be shown on more than one hike. It carries the same credit and the same license everywhere it's shown.

The full terms live on our Terms of Service page.

Agreeing at sign-up

Creating an account asks you to agree to the Terms, which cover this. If you send a suggestion without an account, you'll see a short note about the license next to the send button instead of a checkbox.

When the terms change

The Terms page always shows the version currently in effect. If we update them, you'll be asked to agree to the new version the next time you sign in, before you can add or change anything else. Until you do, you'll see a banner with a link to review and agree. If you're in the middle of an edit, we'll ask right there and save it as soon as you agree.