> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://ai4commsci.gitbook.io/formosanbank/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://ai4commsci.gitbook.io/formosanbank/additional-resources/ai-use-and-commercial-licensing.md).

# AI Use and Commercial Licensing

FormosanBank is available for noncommercial research, education, cultural work, and language revitalization, subject to each corpus's source terms and citation requirements.

Commercial AI use is not permitted without prior written permission from FormosanBank and any applicable rights holders.

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### What counts as Commercial AI Use?

Commercial AI Use means using FormosanBank materials, in whole or in part, for an AI system, dataset, benchmark, product, service, or internal workflow that is commercial, revenue-generating, investor-funded, product-development-oriented, or used to support commercial operations.

This includes:

* training, pretraining, fine-tuning, distilling, or adapting models
* creating embeddings, vector indexes, retrieval systems, or RAG systems
* evaluating, benchmarking, red-teaming, or filtering AI systems
* generating synthetic data, translations, speech, annotations, or derived corpora
* packaging FormosanBank-derived data, features, model weights, adapters, outputs, or embeddings into a commercial product or service

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### Uses that usually do not require separate commercial permission

These uses are generally allowed if they follow the Terms of Use, cite FormosanBank and the relevant source corpora, preserve notices, and respect any stricter corpus-specific restrictions:

* noncommercial academic research
* classroom use
* community language revitalization
* cultural, archival, or documentation work
* personal study
* noncommercial computational experiments whose outputs are not sold, licensed, or deployed commercially

If a corpus page, source publication, XML metadata, dataset card, or contributor agreement has stricter terms, those stricter terms control.

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### Uses that require written permission

Do not use FormosanBank materials without written permission for:

* commercial AI training, fine-tuning, evaluation, embeddings, RAG, or synthetic-data generation
* commercial speech recognition, translation, text generation, search, analytics, or language-technology products
* resale, relicensing, paid hosting, or paid API access to FormosanBank materials or derivatives
* removing, weakening, or hiding source, attribution, license, provenance, or no-commercial-AI notices
* using FormosanBank data in a way that conflicts with source-community expectations, contributor restrictions, privacy constraints, or source-corpus licenses

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### AI Use Addendum

The full AI Use Addendum is maintained with the public repository:

[FormosanBank AI Use Addendum](https://github.com/FormosanBank/FormosanBank/blob/main/AI-USE-ADDENDUM.md)

That addendum defines Commercial AI Use in more detail and states the remedies FormosanBank reserves for unauthorized commercial AI mining, including license-back terms for resulting models, weights, embeddings, datasets, products, and derivatives to the maximum extent permitted by law.

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### Requesting commercial permission

Before any commercial use, contact the FormosanBank team with:

* the corpus or corpora you want to use
* the organization requesting access
* the intended product, service, model, or workflow
* whether the materials will be used for training, fine-tuning, embeddings, RAG, evaluation, or synthetic data
* whether outputs, models, embeddings, datasets, or derivatives will be shared, sold, hosted, or redistributed
* a plan for attribution, notice preservation, data handling, and downstream access control

Do not begin commercial use until written permission is granted.

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### Legal note

This page summarizes FormosanBank's public position. It does not override stricter corpus-specific terms, source licenses, contributor agreements, community restrictions, or written agreements.