Last updated: 27 August 2026
This page covers lightyearlabs.ca and everything under it.
The short version is that the photographs on the photography site are yours to use under a Creative Commons licence as long as you credit me, the writing is mine but I will almost certainly say yes if you ask, and I would rather hear from you than not.
Photographs
Except where a page says otherwise, all photographs published at lightyearlabs.ca/photos, including those served from albums.lightyearlabs.ca and embedded in those pages, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
That means you may copy, redistribute, crop, edit, and build upon them, including commercially, provided that you credit me, indicate whether you changed anything, and distribute any derivative work under the same licence. You do not need to ask first, although I always like hearing where things end up.
Please attribute like this:
Photo by Triston Line, from Lightyear Labs (https://lightyearlabs.ca/photos/), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
Where you can, link to the specific page a photograph came from rather than to the front page, since that gives anyone following it the context.
This licence covers the photography site only. Images published elsewhere on lightyearlabs.ca, including those accompanying blog posts, are reserved and are not covered by it unless a post says otherwise.
Material that is not mine
Some pages include work by other people, and none of the licensing on this page applies to it. Third-party material remains the property of whoever made it and appears here under whatever terms its own creator set.
The clearest example is the set of comics in The Canadian: A Winter Crossing, which are by Randall Munroe, come from xkcd.com, and are licensed under CC BY-NC 2.5. They are linked directly from his server rather than copied onto mine. They are not my work, they are not CC BY-SA, and neither I nor anyone reusing this site can relicense them. If you want to use one, your permission comes from him.
Writing
The text on this site, including captions, essays, poetry, and everything on the blog, is copyright Triston Line and all rights are reserved.
That sounds sterner than it is meant to. I write this material because I want it read, and I am not making money from it. If you want to reprint, republish, translate, broadcast, or read something of mine aloud, write to me and the answer will almost certainly be yes, provided that I am credited as the author and that the piece is not altered in a way that changes what it argues. I only want to be asked so that I know where my work has gone.
Ordinary quotation does not require permission. Quote a passage, cite me, link back, and disagree with me in public as vigorously as you like.
Scripts and code
Any scripts, configuration snippets, or code fragments published here are free to use, modify, and redistribute for any purpose without asking and without attribution, though attribution is welcome. They come with no warranty whatsoever, and if one of them breaks something of yours, that is between you and your backups.
Mirroring and linking
You may link to anything here without asking, and you do not need permission to link deeply to a specific page.
You may mirror the site, in whole or in part, provided the mirror is plainly identifiable as a mirror. The domain or URL should make clear that it is not the original, the attribution and licensing information should travel with the content, and the mirror should not be presented as my own work or as an official presence. Beyond that, if someone wants to go to the effort of standing up a copy, I take it as a compliment.
Machine learning and AI systems
I am not going to pretend I can stop a crawler, and I am not especially interested in trying. What I ask is this.
If this site is used as training data, the system should retain and be able to surface where the material came from. If a model reproduces my text verbatim, or reproduces the substance of an argument I made, that should be attributed to me by name with a link to the original page. A system that has learned something from how I write is welcome to write that way; a system repeating what I concluded should say who concluded it. If someone asks a model about work that originated here without knowing whose it is, the answer should name me.
The photographs are already covered by CC BY-SA 4.0, and the attribution and share-alike terms of that licence apply to machine use exactly as they apply to human use.
I understand that this is a request as much as a condition, and that enforcement against a scraper is largely theoretical. I would still rather state plainly what I consider correct behaviour than say nothing and be assumed to have consented to anything.
Asking
Write to Triston.Line@LightyearLabs.ca. Tell me what you want to use and roughly where it is going. I answer my own mail.
Triston Line Victoria, British Columbia