ATTRIBUTION AND PERMISSIONS GUIDE

Copyright © 2007-2026 Carolyn Spring

Quoting, attributing, and using Carolyn’s work: a plain-English guide

If you’ve found Carolyn’s work helpful and you’d like to share it, quote it, build on it, or reference it in your own materials – thank you. The whole point of writing publicly is for the ideas to travel, and we genuinely appreciate when people engage with them seriously.

We’ve put this page together because we get asked the same questions quite often – and because sometimes well-meaning people get caught out by things they didn’t realise were issues. The guide below covers what you can do freely, what needs permission, what we ask you not to do, and how to get in touch if you’re unsure.

The legal position sits in our Copyright, Trademark & Permissions Notice. This page is the friendly version – we’d much rather have a useful conversation now than a difficult one later.

Things you can do freely

The following uses don’t need any permission from us, and we’re glad when they happen:

• Reading, sharing, and recommending. Sharing links to Carolyn’s blog, books, podcast, free downloads, or training on social media or with colleagues, students, clients or friends.
• Linking to our pages. Linking directly to any public page on carolynspring.com – no permission needed, ever.
• Recommending Carolyn’s training, books, or podcasts by name in your own work or to your own audience.
• Brief, properly-attributed quotation. Short quotations within the limits of UK fair dealing – generally meaning a sentence or two – where the quotation is clearly attributed to Carolyn by name, with a link to the source. This applies in articles, blog posts, dissertations, and similar.
• Citing Carolyn academically. Standard academic citation in essays, theses, peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, following normal scholarly conventions.

If what you want to do falls clearly into one of these, you don’t need to write to us first. We’re happy.

Things that need permission

Please get in touch with us before:

• Reproducing whole articles, sections, or substantial passages of Carolyn’s writing in any publication – whether a book, booklet, training manual, conference handout, magazine, newsletter, course resource, online article, or anywhere else.
• Adapting, paraphrasing, summarising, or condensing any of Carolyn’s work into your own materials. This includes ‘based on Carolyn Spring’s…’ adaptations, even when extensively reworded.
• Translating any of Carolyn’s work into another language.
• Using any of Carolyn’s images, infographics, slides, diagrams, or designs.
• Reproducing free downloads beyond personal or one-to-one professional use (e.g. distributing to a group, including in a training pack, posting on an organisational intranet).
• Using Carolyn’s name in the title, subtitle, marketing, or promotional material of any publication, course, event, or programme.
• Identifying Carolyn as a contributor, endorser, or partner in any project, publication or initiative.
• Quoting at length in any commercial context (paid courses, paid publications, paid services).

Permission is often granted free of charge for non-commercial, educational, charitable, or survivor-focused projects. For commercial use we’ll usually have a conversation about a licence. Either way, the request is welcome, and we’re not difficult to deal with.

Things we ask you not to do

A few things we genuinely can’t allow, regardless of the context:

• Don’t attribute work to Carolyn that she didn’t write or contribute to. This is the one that comes up most often – usually unintentionally, when people summarise from memory or stitch together material from various sources and attribute the whole thing to Carolyn. Even with the best intentions, this misrepresents her work to your readers and creates real problems for everyone. If you’re not sure whether something is genuinely Carolyn’s, please ask us before publishing.
• Don’t use Carolyn’s name as if she’s endorsed something she hasn’t personally seen and approved. Carolyn does not endorse books, training programmes, organisations, frameworks, products, or services unless she has personally reviewed them and agreed in writing. If you’d like an endorsement, please ask – but please don’t infer one.
• Don’t put Carolyn’s name on adapted, condensed, or paraphrased versions of her work without explicit permission. A short attributed quote is welcome; a four-page ‘adapted summary’ under her name is a different matter and needs prior agreement, both for the adaptation itself and for the use of her name.
• Don’t use ‘Carolyn Spring’ as the author, contributor, or originator of any AI-generated, machine-rephrased, or chatbot-derived content, even if the AI was prompted with her materials. AI rephrasing is not an adaptation we can authorise, and the outputs are not Carolyn’s work.
• Don’t use any of Carolyn’s content – text, images, audio, video, downloads – to train, fine-tune, or otherwise develop AI systems or large language models. This applies whether the use is by individuals, organisations, or platforms.

A note about Carolyn’s name

‘Carolyn Spring’ is a registered UK trademark (in the area of training and publishing). What that means in practical terms is straightforward: we have to be careful about how the name is used in published materials and educational contexts. Linking to the website, recommending the books, quoting briefly with attribution – all fine. Using the name as the apparent author, contributor, or endorser of something published elsewhere is where permission becomes necessary.

We don’t say this to be officious. We say it because we have a legal duty to look after the trademark, and because – realistically – if Carolyn’s name is on something, readers reasonably assume she wrote it or approved it. So the bar for using the name in a published or commercial context is higher than for using the underlying ideas.

How to ask for permission

We’d much rather have the conversation than not. To make it easy:

• Contact us in advance of your intended use – ideally a few weeks before, longer for larger projects.
• Tell us what you’d like to use (which article, which passage, which image, or which idea), and roughly how much.
• Tell us where it would appear (the publication or context, the format, the audience, the print run or circulation, whether commercial or non-commercial, the dates).
• Tell us a bit about you and your organisation so we can understand the context.

We aim to respond within a couple of weeks. For most non-commercial, educational, charitable, or survivor-focused requests, we’ll be able to grant permission free of charge under a simple written licence – usually valid for three years. For commercial requests we’ll have a conversation about terms.

Contact: here

If something has gone wrong already

If you’ve published or distributed something that you now realise may have used Carolyn’s work or name in a way it shouldn’t have, please get in touch with us as soon as you can. We are genuinely much easier to deal with when people come to us early and in good faith. Most issues are straightforward to resolve – usually by retitling, removing the attribution, replacing with a licensed extract of the actual material, or some combination. We’ve yet to find a situation that couldn’t be put right by a sensible conversation.