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Copyright & licence.

Every OUBAS volume, cartoon and feature film is an original work of the OUBAS Institute, protected by copyright and supplied to buyers under a single-user licence.

Ownership

© OUBAS Institute. All rights in the OUBAS Documentary Series, the OUBAS TV episodes, the cartoons and the feature films — including text, narration, artwork, music and subtitles — are reserved. Copyright arises automatically in South Africa under the Copyright Act 98 of 1978 and is recognised internationally under the Berne Convention. No registration is required for these rights to exist or to be enforced.

What your purchase gives you

A purchase grants a personal, non-transferable, single-user licence to read, listen to or view the work for your own private use. It is not a transfer of copyright.

You may not, without written permission from OUBAS:

  • share, forward, upload, resell or publish the file;
  • reproduce it for a class, congregation, company or organisation;
  • remove, obscure or alter any watermark or copyright notice;
  • use it to train, fine-tune or index an artificial-intelligence system.

Institutional, classroom and broadcast licences are available on request.

Per-copy watermarking

Reading and viewing on oubas.org is the default and preferred way to enjoy our works. Where a file is supplied for download, it is generated individually for you at the moment of delivery: every page of a PDF carries your name, email address and order reference, and the file's document properties record the same details. Films and cartoons carry an on-screen licence mark identifying the account watching them.

This means any copy found circulating can be traced back to the exact purchase it came from. Watermarks are not a punishment for honest readers — they simply make casual redistribution attributable, which is the strongest practical deterrent available for digital works.

Reporting an unauthorised copy

If you encounter an OUBAS work being distributed without permission, please tell us. We maintain a complete order log and can establish the origin of a leaked file, which allows us to issue takedown notices to hosting providers, platforms and search engines.

Write to admin.books@oubas.org with the link or a screenshot. We do not pursue readers who report in good faith.

Quotation and fair dealing

Short quotations for the purposes of review, criticism, reporting, teaching or scholarship are welcome, provided the work, volume and OUBAS Institute are clearly credited. Reproduction of substantial portions requires written permission.