Use, License & Reuse Policy

This page describes how the work published at www.it-help.tech is licensed. Different parts of the site are covered by different terms. The short version is that most things are reserved, a small set of research write-ups can be openly reused only when they say so on the page, and access by AI/search crawlers is not the same as a license to republish.

This is a plain-English operations policy, not legal advice. If you need a formal license for something specific, write to licensing@it-help.tech and we will answer in writing.

The machine-readable companion lives in the repository as LICENSE and NOTICE.

1. Corporate site content and code — all rights reserved

The business-facing parts of this site — including the home page, Services, Billing, About, Managed Agent, Full-Day Engagements, Privacy, Security Policy, Contact, and all pricing, packaging, and methodology copy — are proprietary work product of IT Help San Diego Inc. The same applies to the templates, SASS, JavaScript, build scripts, and infrastructure code in our repositories that we authored.

You may quote short excerpts for commentary, criticism, news reporting, or scholarship consistent with U.S. fair-use principles, with attribution and a link back to the source page. Anything more — mirroring, redistribution, modification, training, derivative products — requires written permission.

2. Field notes / public research — reserved by default, CC BY 4.0

only where the page says so

Field Notes are part of our public research record. They cover topics like DNS, email security, Mac IT, password ergonomics, and AI model behaviour, and they cite primary sources so other practitioners can verify our work.

By default, each field note is all rights reserved, just like the rest of the site. We do not silently relicense research articles as open content.

A field note is offered under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) only when the article itself is explicitly marked, in one of two equivalent ways:

If neither mark is present, the article is reserved. If you are unsure, ask before republishing.

When CC BY 4.0 does apply, attribution should read substantially as:

"<Article title>" by Carey Balboa / IT Help San Diego Inc., licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source: https://www.it-help.tech/field-notes/<slug>/

Embedded media inside an openly licensed field note — photographs, diagrams, screenshots, logos, owl marks — remain governed by sections 4 and 5 below unless the caption explicitly says otherwise. An open licence on the text does not extend to the brand mark next to it.

3. DNS Tool — separate license (BUSL-1.1)

DNS Tool and its CLI live in their own repository, dns-tool-intel, and are distributed under the Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL-1.1). Any DNS Tool references on this site — descriptions, screenshots, sample reports, methodology summaries — are covered by the DNS Tool project's own license and citation terms (including its Zenodo deposit where applicable).

Nothing on www.it-help.tech grants additional rights over DNS Tool software, source, or outputs. When in doubt, defer to the LICENSE, NOTICE, and CITATION.cff files in the DNS Tool repository.

4. Immutable Fact AI / The Real Bot path — reserved commercial work

Pages, prototypes, naming, and design work tied to our Immutable Fact AI / "The Real Bot" product path — including the field note The Real Bot Hasn't Been Built Yet and its companion PDF — are protected commercial work product. They are not offered under CC BY 4.0 or any other open license, even though they appear under /field-notes/. The CC BY 4.0 marker described in section 2 will not be applied to these pages. Licensing or collaboration: licensing@it-help.tech.

5. Brand, logos, owl marks, trademarks — all rights reserved

Reserved unless and until we agree otherwise in writing:

Trademark rights are asserted independently of any content licence elsewhere on the site, and survive them. A CC BY 4.0 marker on a field note does not license the owl, the wordmark, or the company name.

6. Third-party theme and dependencies — their own licences

We build on third-party work that keeps its own licence:

Nothing in our policy overrides those upstream licences.

7. AI and LLM crawlers — access is not a reuse licence

Our robots.txt and llms.txt deliberately allow major AI and search crawlers — GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, GeminiBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, YouBot, PhindBot, ExaBot, AndiBot, FirecrawlAgent, and the traditional Googlebot / Bingbot — to fetch and index publicly available pages. We want real people who ask an assistant about "Apple IT in San Diego" or "how DMARC works" to find an accurate, first-party answer.

That permission is narrow and operational. Access is not a licence to reuse. Specifically, allowing a crawler to read these pages does not grant:

Sections 1 through 5 above still apply. If you operate an AI system and want broader reuse rights, contact licensing@it-help.tech. We are happy to talk; we are not happy to be quietly relicensed.

8. Reporting problems and asking for permission

This page may be updated. The version at https://www.it-help.tech/use-policy/ is canonical; the repository LICENSE and NOTICE files are the operational summary.

This page describes how IT Help San Diego Inc. makes its work available. It is not legal advice and does not create a lawyer-client relationship.