License of original content
© Giuseppe Alfieri. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise stated, all original text, diagrams, SVGs, plots, figures, images, animations, videos, code snippets, visual summaries, tables, callouts, derivations as presented, and editorial structure on this website are authored by Giuseppe Alfieri and are protected by copyright.
You may read the website for personal study, share links to the original pages, and quote short excerpts with attribution. Any other use requires prior written permission.
This choice is deliberate. A Creative Commons license, even the most restrictive one, still grants the public the right to copy and redistribute the unmodified work for non-commercial purposes. The intent here is narrower: the material may be read, linked, and briefly quoted with attribution, but not rehosted, extracted, repackaged, translated, or reused without permission. The clearest way to state that is to reserve all rights and then list the few uses that are expressly allowed.
In plain language, the following table summarizes what this means.
| Action | Permitted? | Conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Reading the notes, taking private personal study notes, using the math to learn | ✅ Yes | None |
| Sharing a link to a page of the site | ✅ Yes | None |
| Quoting a short passage for educational or scholarly purposes | ✅ Yes | Attribution to Giuseppe Alfieri, Deep Learning: Zero to Hero, with a link to the source page |
| Saving, extracting, reposting, embedding, rehosting, or reusing original images, diagrams, SVGs, animations, videos, thumbnails, or frames | ❌ No | Prior written permission required |
| Republishing, mirroring, scraping for reuse, or hosting the content elsewhere | ❌ No | Prior written permission required |
| Producing derivative works for redistribution, including translations, summaries, paraphrases, rewordings, slide decks, course material, or AI-generated reformulations | ❌ No | Prior written permission required |
| Commercial use of any kind, including monetized courses, paid newsletters, or ad-supported reposts | ❌ No | Prior written permission required |
| Using the content to train, fine-tune, validate, or evaluate a machine-learning model | ❌ No | Prior written permission required |
What requires prior written permission
You may not copy, extract, download for reuse, repost, rehost, mirror, scrape, embed, redistribute, include in slide decks or course material, or use the original content or assets for machine-learning training, fine-tuning, validation, or evaluation, without prior written permission from the author. The same applies to translating, summarizing, paraphrasing, or otherwise adapting the content for publication or redistribution. Private study notes kept for personal use are not affected.
Original images and animations are protected
The visual and animated assets created for this site are part of the site’s original content. This includes, without limitation, SVG diagrams, plots, figures, illustrations, screenshots produced for the notes, Manim animations, videos, GIFs, WebM/MP4 files, thumbnails, preview images, and exported animation frames.
These assets may be viewed on this website for personal study. They may not be copied, extracted, downloaded for reuse, screenshotted for redistribution, embedded on another website, rehosted, mirrored, included in repositories or slide decks, used in course material, reposted on social media, used as thumbnails, included in datasets, or fed into image, video, multimodal, or language-model training and evaluation pipelines without prior written permission from the author.
On AI training and dataset scraping
The author does not consent to the use of this site’s original content as training data, validation data, or evaluation data for any machine-learning system, including large language models, retrieval-augmented systems, code generators, image generators, and multimodal models. All rights in the original content are reserved. Any reproduction, extraction, storage, dataset inclusion, or use of the original content for training, fine-tuning, validation, evaluation, model development, or generation of derived artifacts requires prior written permission from the author.
What "original content" means here
“Original content” refers to material written, derived, organized, illustrated, animated, recorded, rendered, exported, or otherwise produced by Giuseppe Alfieri for this website. It includes the author’s original text, diagrams, SVGs, plots, figures, images, animations, videos, thumbnails, and exported frames. It does not cover:
- quoted excerpts and short fragments from third-party works, which remain subject to the rights and licenses of their respective owners;
- mathematical formulas in their bare symbolic form, which are not copyrightable;
- factual statements about historical events, dates, and published results, which are not copyrightable;
- third-party images and figures embedded with attribution, which remain under their original licenses;
- clearly marked adapted material from Michael Nielsen’s work.
Third-party and adapted material
Michael Nielsen, Neural Networks and Deep Learning
A subset of the early material on this site is adapted from, or inspired by, Michael A. Nielsen’s Neural Networks and Deep Learning (Determination Press, 2015).
Nielsen’s book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0). Adapted material from that source is presented here for non-commercial educational purposes, in accordance with the terms of that license.
Where Nielsen’s material has been adapted, the adapted text remains under CC BY-NC 3.0, and credit is given to the original author. The full legal deed of CC BY-NC 3.0 is available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.
Other third-party works
Citations of papers, books, datasets, historical references, quoted fragments, and third-party images remain subject to the rights and licenses of their respective authors, publishers, or creators. This site does not claim ownership over third-party material.
Where third-party images or diagrams are embedded, attribution is provided at the point of use, and those images remain under their original licenses.
Permissions and requests
Use beyond reading the site, linking to it, and quoting short excerpts with attribution requires prior written permission from the author. Specifically, permission must be obtained before:
- republishing any portion of the original content on another site, blog, repository, wiki, or distribution channel;
- producing translations, summaries, paraphrases, slide decks, or course material based on the original content, for publication or distribution;
- including the original content in any AI training, fine-tuning, or evaluation corpus;
- any commercial use whatsoever.
Permission requests should be directed to the author through the feedback page or via the contact details published on the site’s homepage. Requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Granting permission for one specific use does not constitute a general license for other uses.
Default answer
In the absence of explicit written permission, the default answer is no. All rights are reserved; nothing on this page should be read as granting rights beyond reading the site, linking to it, and quoting short excerpts with attribution.
Enforcement
The author reserves all rights not expressly granted by the terms stated above and may pursue any remedies available under applicable copyright law against unauthorized use. This includes, but is not limited to, takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the EU Copyright Directive, and equivalent statutes in other jurisdictions.
Summary
| Component | License / status | Permissions |
|---|---|---|
| Original content by Giuseppe Alfieri (text, structure, derivations, callouts, tables, diagrams, SVGs, plots, images, animations, videos, exported frames, code by the author) | © All rights reserved | Read, link, short scholarly quotation with attribution. No republication, asset extraction, rehosting, derivatives, commercial use, or AI training without prior written permission. |
| Material adapted from Michael Nielsen (clearly marked) | CC BY-NC 3.0 | As permitted by CC BY-NC 3.0 with attribution to Michael Nielsen |
| Citations of third-party works (papers, books, datasets) | Citation only; rights remain with original authors | Standard scholarly citation rules apply |
| Third-party images (when embedded with attribution) | Original licenses of those works | As permitted by the original license |
| Bare mathematical formulas and factual statements | Not claimed as copyright | Free to use |
Final note
This site is a long-term project. The material on it has been written carefully, derivation by derivation, with the goal of producing a deep-learning reference that respects both the mathematics and the reader. The terms above exist to protect that work from being mirrored, repackaged, or fed into machine-learning training pipelines without consent. Citation and linking back to the original page are not only permitted but encouraged; everything else requires permission.
Giuseppe Alfieri