Barcodepedia

Content Licence

Version 2 · Last updated: 2026-09-10

Barcodepedia is open content, the way Wikipedia and Open Food Facts are. Take it, build on it, credit us and link back, and keep it open.

In plain words

  • Read, quote, copy, reuse. On your site, in your app, in your dataset, in your model. Commercially too. You do not need to ask.
  • Say where it came from. Credit "Barcodepedia" and link to the page you took it from. That link is the whole price.
  • Keep it open. If you publish something built from our text or data, publish it under the same open terms so the next person can build on yours.
  • Do not pretend it is yours, and do not use our name or logo to suggest we endorse what you made.
  • Fetching a lot? Use the sitemaps at a reasonable rate, or write to us for a dump. It is cheaper for both of us than a crawl.

This box is a summary, not the licence. The sections below are what binds.

The licences

Text and contributor photos
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). The About sections, notes, descriptions and every photo marked as a contributor photo.
Facts and the database
Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. The barcodes, names, relations, ingredient rows, nutrition values and references, and the selection and arrangement of them as a whole. Individual facts (a barcode, a net content, an E-number) are not copyrightable and nothing here claims otherwise; the ODbL covers the database, not the fact.
Third-party images
The licence named in the credit under each image. Photos from Open Food Facts are CC BY-SA 3.0 by Open Food Facts contributors and may be reused on those terms.

How to credit

One line with a link to the page is enough, in whatever form fits your medium:

Source: Barcodepedia, https://barcodepedia.com/product/5449000000996/coca-cola-original-taste-330-ml-can (CC BY-SA 4.0 / ODbL)

For a whole dataset, credit "Barcodepedia, barcodepedia.com" once in your documentation and keep the per-page URL in the data where you can. Every page has a "cite this page" line at the bottom you can copy.

Share alike, in practice

  • Quoting, linking, embedding a fact in an article or an app: just credit. Share-alike only applies when you republish our text or a substantial part of the database, or something derived from them.
  • A product built on our data (an app, a site, a model) may be commercial and closed; the data you redistribute from it stays ODbL, and any modified text you publish stays CC BY-SA.
  • Training a machine-learning model on the content is allowed with credit. Whether the model's outputs carry the share-alike obligation is unsettled law; we do not claim they do.
  • If share-alike does not fit your use, a separate licence is available: write to [email protected].

Contributions

When you save an edit you keep the copyright in what you wrote and you agree to two things:

  1. Your text and photos are published under CC BY-SA 4.0 and your facts under the ODbL, irrevocably, so that everyone, including you, can rely on the terms above.
  2. You also grant Moltke Benjaminsen ApS a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable and sub-licensable licence to use, store, reproduce, modify, publish and distribute your contribution as part of Barcodepedia and any successor work, including under other licences. This is what lets the operator offer a commercial licence to users who cannot accept share-alike, and it does not narrow what the public licences give everyone else.

You confirm the contribution is your own work or consists of facts and short quotations you are entitled to contribute, that it does not copy text from other sites, and you waive, to the extent the law allows, moral rights that would prevent the uses above. Attribution for contributions is to the page's history, where every version carries the contributor's handle.

Third-party material and what stays ours

  • Facts looked up from Open Food Facts are cited per product; Open Food Facts' data is under the ODbL, and by publishing our database under the ODbL we pass that obligation on unchanged.
  • USDA FoodData Central data is public domain (CC0) and is cited where used.
  • The GPC category tree is published by GS1 and used under GS1's terms; category definitions are GS1's text, not ours to relicense.
  • Cited sources belong to their publishers. A citation is a link, not a licence.
  • The Barcodepedia name and wordmark are trademarks of Moltke Benjaminsen ApS. Credit us by name; do not use the name or logo to suggest endorsement.
  • The site's software is closed source and is not licensed to anyone. The content is open; the code is not.

Product imagery and rights holders

Album covers via Cover Art Archive / MusicBrainz are displayed for identification of the corresponding product and marked as editorial use. The source credit identifies where we obtained the image; it does not imply that either provider owns the artwork or grants a licence to reuse it. These covers are not covered by Barcodepedia's open-content licences.

If you own rights to a product image and want it removed or replaced, contact us with the product page and the image concerned. We retain source and retrieval records to help identify the image.

Bulk access

The sitemap lists every indexed page with its last change, and the site announces changes through IndexNow. Fetch at a reasonable rate and identify your client. If you want the whole database, write to us and we will give you a dump rather than watch you crawl it.

Moltke Benjaminsen ApS (MB Alpha), CVR 45555399, Denmark
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