You are encouraged to use and re-use the Information that is available under this licence freely and flexibly, with only a few conditions.

Using Information under this licence

Use of copyright and database right material expressly made available under this licence (the ‘Information’) indicates your acceptance of the terms and conditions below.

The Licensor grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use the Information subject to the conditions below.

This licence does not affect your freedom under fair dealing or fair use or any other copyright or database right exceptions and limitations.

You are free to:

  • View the Information.

You must (where you do any of the above):

  • Use the Information in line with the AI and ML conditions.
  • Acknowledge the source of the Information by including the following attribution statement: (updating the year as appropriate to your work): “Derived from and/or containing materials licensed from The British Geological Survey BGS©UKRI, [year]”; and, where possible, provide a link to this licence.

If you are using Information from several Information Providers and listing multiple attributions is not practical in your product or application, you may include a URI or hyperlink to a resource that contains the required attribution statements.

AI and ML use conditions

You are free to:

  • Use the Information with general purpose software that includes in-built Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) features in the software, such as conversational assistants, automated defaults, or pre-trained analytical models, subject to the terms below.
  • Use AI or ML techniques (including fitting or training a model) to analyse the Information so as to produce results for your interpretation only.

You must not, without the Licensor’s separate permission:

  • Use any technical measures to download, replicate or recreate any substantial part of the Information made available to view in the viewer, noting that:
    1. the Licensor considers that up to 20 images a month extracted from the data (e.g. screen grabs) is insubstantial; and
    2. Data available to view under these licence terms may be made available to download and then use (commercially) under separate licence terms and conditions – please refer to the specific data of interest for separate licence details.
  • Share, sell, distribute or make available any model developed with the Information utilising any AI or ML techniques.
  • Use the Information to train, fine-tune, pre-train or otherwise develop an artificial-intelligence or machine-learning model, including any generative AI system, large language model or foundation model, that will be accessible to any third party.
  • Make the Information available to a third party, by submitting it to a hosted AI service, in circumstances where that third party is permitted to retain it for, or use it in, training or developing its models.
  • For any use beyond these terms, you must gain express written permission from BGS prior to such use. Please contact IPRdigital@bgs.ac.uk with full details of any use cases.

All listed conditions are material to this licence and if you fail to comply with them, the rights granted to you under this licence will end automatically.

Exemptions

This licence does not cover:

  • personal data in the Information;
  • Information that has not been accessed by way of publication or disclosure under information access legislation (including the Freedom of Information Acts for the UK and Scotland) by or with the consent of the Information Provider;
  • departmental or public sector organisation logos, crests and the Royal Arms except where they form an integral part of a document or dataset;
  • military insignia;
  • third party rights the Information Provider is not authorised to license;
  • other intellectual property rights, including patents, trade marks, and design rights; and
  • identity documents such as the British Passport.

Non-endorsement

This licence does not grant you any right to use the Information in a way that suggests any official status or that the Information Provider and/or Licensor endorse you or your use of the Information.

No warranty

The Information is licensed ‘as is’ and the Information Provider and/or Licensor excludes all representations, warranties, obligations and liabilities in relation to the Information to the maximum extent permitted by law.

The Information Provider and/or Licensor are not liable for any errors or omissions in the Information and shall not be liable for any loss, injury or damage of any kind caused by its use. The Information Provider does not guarantee the continued supply of the Information.

Governing Law

This licence is governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which the Information Provider has its principal place of business, unless otherwise specified by the Information Provider.

Definitions

In this licence, the terms below have the following meanings:

‘Commercial purposes’
means any activity by any person or organisation that receives any direct monetary consideration by offering a service and/or product containing BGS material or derived material e.g. the sale of a book or newsletter with a charge, even though that charge may not meet the full costs of the publication or use. Commercial activity further includes any indirect monetary advantage or benefit received by any person or organisation by the offering of any service and/or product as described above. BGS considers that “Commercial purposes” include the sale, or the intention to develop sellable goods or services, that contain BGS data or materials derived from it; but do not include funded or sponsored academic or scientific research containing or derived from BGS data, provided that the research itself (and any outputs from it) remains for non-commercial purposes and does not aim for, or result in, immediate market or financial gain. Organisations include Government and other local authorities and their contractors.
‘Information’
means information protected by copyright or by database right (for example, literary and artistic works, content, data and source code) offered for use under the terms of this licence.
‘Information Provider’
means the person or organisation providing the Information under this licence.
‘Licensor’
means any Information Provider which has the authority to offer Information under the terms of this licence or the Keeper of Public Records, who has the authority to offer Information subject to Crown copyright and Crown database rights and Information subject to copyright and database right that has been assigned to or acquired by the Crown, under the terms of this licence.
‘Non-Commercial purposes’
means any activity other than for Commercial purposes.
‘Use’
means doing any act which is restricted by copyright or database right, whether in the original medium or in any other medium, and includes without limitation distributing, copying, adapting, modifying as may be technically necessary to use it in a different mode or format.
‘You’, ‘you’ and ‘your’
means the natural or legal person, or body of persons corporate or incorporate, acquiring rights in the Information (whether the Information is obtained directly from the Licensor or otherwise) under this licence.