Copyright, Rights Policy & Scholarly Citation

Why this research, original translation, and apparatus are published under traditional copyright with explicit academic fair-use permissions.

Summary Statement:
The 1494 Venetian source text by Fra Luca Pacioli is in the public domain and belongs to humanity. The Immutable Ledger (Draft 20), the comparative study, the editorial method, the textual apparatus, and accompanying essays are the work of Anthony Mellor, FCA (© 2026). The story and argument of the article are his own; the passages that quote Pacioli are kept in line with the project’s current translation, with AI help, under his control. The project’s reading of the print and its Italian and English translation drafts were made by AI models under his direction and control, and are published on this site as machine drafts (English, Italian). AI output contains errors; finding and correcting them is part of the author’s role, as the Editorial Method page explains. Scholarly quotation, academic review, and non-commercial educational study are explicitly welcomed and encouraged with proper attribution.

1. The Public Domain vs. Original Intellectual Property

It is important to draw a clear legal distinction between the Renaissance primary source and the modern scholarship presented on this site:

The 1494 Venetian Print: Luca Pacioli’s Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita (Venice: Paganino de’ Paganini, November 1494), specifically Distinctio IX, Tractatus XI (Particularis de computis et scripturis), has been in the public domain for centuries. The high-resolution 300 DPI digital scans provided by the Library of Congress are distributed via Zenodo under Creative Commons CC-BY.
The 2026 Scholarship: Reading the 1494 print with a multi-model AI framework, building a textual apparatus of doubtful readings, and constructing comparisons with earlier translations represent substantial labour, directed and controlled by the author, who decides which AI does what and when, keeps the roles separate, finds and corrects the AI’s errors, and decides what stays. Under UK and international copyright law (Berne Convention), original analytical works are protected literary works owned by their author.

2. Why I Have Chosen This Route at This Time

I have consciously chosen to retain full copyright rather than releasing this work under an unencumbered commercial open license (such as CC-0 or CC-BY without restrictions) for three specific reasons:

A. Protection Against Commercial Scraping and Opportunistic Reselling

A new English translation of Pacioli’s bookkeeping treatise made from the 1494 editio princeps is rare. Earlier English translations exist (Geijsbeek 1914, Crivelli 1924, Brown and Johnston 1963, among others), and Sangster and Santini (2022) have translated Chapter 1 afresh.

Under a permissive commercial license, automated print-on-demand scrapers, Amazon Kindle republishers, and content-harvesting mills could instantly take this 36-chapter translation, slap a commercial cover on it, and sell it for private profit without contributing anything to the project or seeking permission. Retaining copyright legally prohibits third-party commercial exploitation.

B. Preserving Future Monograph and Academic Press Publication

Retaining full rights ensures that should The Immutable Ledger and this investigation be published as a physical book, an academic monograph, or an institutional historical volume (for example, through the ICAEW, an academic university press, or a fine-press edition), the author retains clear, unencumbered rights to license the work to a publisher. Academic and trade publishers generally decline works whose commercial publication rights have already been irrevocably given away.

C. Safeguarding Textual Integrity and Authorship

This project is an ongoing palaeographic and forensic effort. Retaining copyright ensures that distorted, truncated, or hallucinated third-party modifications cannot circulate under my name, preserving the integrity of the apparatus and the accounting proofs.

3. Academic Citation & Fair Quotation Policy

Scholarly inquiry must remain open. Nothing in this copyright policy is intended to hinder academic debate, historical research, or educational instruction.

Researchers, accounting historians, students, and reviewers are explicitly granted permission to:

Quote extracts, passages, and chapter sections for commentary, scholarly analysis, peer review, and academic papers under statutory fair dealing (UK) and fair use (US).
Reproduce and discuss items from the Textual Apparatus (the 26 low-confidence readings and 44 mark-level doubts).
Use the materials in university lectures, seminars, and professional education with appropriate credit.

Commercial republication, whole-work reprinting, or packaging into commercial software or publications requires prior written consent.

4. How to Cite This Work

When referencing this work in academic papers, bibliographies, or articles, please use the following formats:

The Immutable Ledger (Draft 20):

Mellor, Anthony David (2026). The Immutable Ledger (Draft 20). An article on double-entry bookkeeping quoting selected passages of Pacioli's 1494 treatise. Story and argument by the author; the quotations from Pacioli are kept in line with the project's current translation, with AI help. Available at: https://anthonymellor.com/debitsandcredits-2026/

The Comparative Study:

Mellor, Anthony David (2026). Geijsbeek and the 1494 Print: Some Comparisons. Available at: https://anthonymellor.com/words/classical-vs-ai-comparison.html

The 1494 Resolved Reading & Apparatus:

Mellor, Anthony David (2026). Luca Pacioli: Treatise XI (1494 Venice Editio Princeps) — Resolved Reading (Draft 7, machine reading) and Textual Apparatus. Available at: https://anthonymellor.com/words/pacioli-1494-text.html

A complete BibTeX file is available for instant import into reference managers (Zotero, Mendeley, BibDesk) or ORCID: → Download anthony-mellor-pacioli-works.bib

5. Author & Researcher Identity

Anthony David Mellor, FCA
Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).
Persistent Researcher Identifier: ORCID: 0009-0000-3401-8602 ↗