Copyright and sources
We only publish tales that are unambiguously free to use, and we are careful about it in a way most sites are not.
The tale is not the risk
A folk tale cannot be copyrighted. Only a specific written version can be, and for the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Perrault, Aesop, Joseph Jacobs and the rest, those versions passed into the public domain a very long time ago.
We publish only titles that are clear in both the United States and the EU and UK, with no territorial divergence, no royalty obligation and no trademark overlay. Anything with a caveat is excluded, even where it is technically legal, because there are hundreds of completely clean tales and no reason to build a marginal one.
The two things that actually catch people out
Translations carry their own separate copyright, running from the translator's life, not the original author's. A tale can be public domain while the English version you are reading is not. Several popular twentieth-century translations are republished online as though they were free, and they are not.
Illustrations are the same. Some famous fairy tale artists died recently enough that their work is still protected in Europe while being free in the United States.
We sidestep both: every retelling is new text written from the tale itself, never copied from a translation, and our pictures are made by us in our own style. Where a public domain translation informed the research, the story page says which one.
How the retellings are written
The retellings, the songs and the character work are written with AI tools from the public domain tales, and the underlying tales belong to everybody. If you quote us, please link to the page you quoted.
How the media is made
The stories on this site are new retellings of public-domain tales, written with AI tools. The illustrations, narration, songs (music and vocals), song videos and the dragon mascot's artwork are created with AI tools too.
If you think we have got something wrong
Tell us at hello@dragonkidsland.com and we will look at it properly. If a rights holder has a genuine claim we will take the page down while we check, not after.