Every page in this family says the site belongs outright to the person it is about. That sentence is doing a lot of work. This page takes it apart into the five things it is made of, names who holds each one, and says plainly where the claim is weaker than it sounds — including one defect in how these sites are licensed today.
You own the domain and you own the words. Those are the two things that matter, and both are yours on the public record from the day they exist.
You do not own the hosting — and neither does anyone else who is not running their own machine in their own building. GitHub can shut your site off at any time, for no reason, with no notice, and says so in its terms.
The reason that is survivable is that everything you own is portable in an afternoon. The files are plain files. The domain points wherever you tell it. Losing the host costs you a Saturday, not your site.
Everything below is the detail behind those three sentences.
This is the real ownership artifact, and the only one that is worth money. A domain is registered to a registrant — a named person or entity — through an accredited registrar, and the relationship is a registration agreement between those two parties. ICANN publishes what a registrant is entitled to: the agreement itself in writing, honest pricing, and clear instructions for registering, managing, transferring, renewing and restoring the name [3].
Held by: you, as the named registrant
The word that matters is transferring. A domain is not tied to the registrar you bought it from, or to the host it currently points at. If a registrar behaves badly you move the name elsewhere and it keeps working. That portability is what makes the address yours rather than rented.
The one obligation is renewal. A domain is a lease, not a freehold: about a dollar a month, and if it lapses it eventually returns to the market and somebody else can take it. There is no version of this where nobody has to remember. Put the renewal on a card in a drawer.
Copyright in what you wrote is yours automatically, from the moment you write it. Nobody grants it to you, there is nothing to file, and no platform can take it. This is true on Facebook too, and it is the part of the ownership question that is genuinely not in dispute anywhere.
Held by: you, automatically
What differs between one arrangement and another is never who owns the content. It is what license you had to hand over to publish it, and whether you can leave with anything. That comparison is F7.
One HTML file, a stylesheet inside it, three or four small scripts, an icon, a picture or two. No database, no content system, no proprietary format, and nothing that needs an account to open.
Held by: you — a folder you can copy
There is no export feature because there is nothing to export from. Copying the folder is the export, and what you get is the whole working site, not a dump of your text with the layout stripped off. This is the unglamorous item that makes F2 mean something: an address you can move is only useful if you have something to move to it.
GitHub's terms are unusually plain and worth reading rather than paraphrasing. Three provisions matter here.
Held by: GitHub, entirely, at their discretion
Say this part out loud to anyone you set a site up for. Free hosting is free because it is not a promise. The honest claim is not “this will always be here” — it is “if this stops being here, you lose a Saturday and nothing else,” because the domain is yours and the files are on your own disk.
There is also a provision people miss: making a repository public grants every other user of the service “a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, perform and reproduce (by forking)” your content through the service [2]. Publishing openly is itself a grant. For a site whose whole purpose is to be read, that is unobjectionable — but it should be a decision rather than a surprise.
For two weeks every repository in this family carried a bare MIT license at its root, which gave away the subject’s words along with the format. Corrected on 26 September 2026. The account of it stays here, because a defect that is quietly deleted once fixed teaches nobody anything.
MIT is exactly right for the format. The method is published free so that the thirteenth site costs nobody anything, and a permissive license is how that promise is kept.
But the license file sits at the root of the repository, and a repository holds more than the format. On gyro-sites.online it also holds sites/east-bench-farm/ and sites/bighorn-tree-service/. Until 26 September the MIT grant reached those too — which meant anyone could copy, modify, redistribute and commercially reuse those pages’ text, with nothing owed but an attribution line.
For the two samples this costs nothing, because they are invented. For a real subject it would be a genuine mistake: a farm's price list, a contractor's insurance page and a shop's own words, handed to any competitor who wants them, by a file nobody read.
What it should be instead: the format’s files permissively licensed, the subject’s content reserved, and the boundary written down where the site is handed over. One license file cannot do both jobs while it lives at the root of a repository containing both.
What was done, 26 September 2026. The license file no longer tries to do both jobs in silence — it now names the two things separately before granting anything. The format, the markup, the stylesheets, the scripts and the tooling remain under MIT, unchanged and unconditional. The written content — the prose, the answers, the source previews and the reasons they are cited, the chronicles and the pictures — is reserved, with quotation under fair use expressly welcomed. Every page in the family now carries the same line in its footer: © 2026 Walter Wilkinson · code MIT · words reserved, linking back to this section.
Two repositories in the family had no license file at all, which is the stricter position by default but says nothing out loud. They now carry the same split as the rest, so that every site in the family answers the question the same way.
Recorded here because the format requires that failures be published rather than fixed quietly. Found 24 September 2026, corrected 26 September 2026. The interval is part of the record: anyone who copied a sample page’s text in those two days did so under a grant that was genuinely given, and that is not retracted here.
On every arrangement below, you keep copyright. What changes is the license you grant in order to publish, and what you are able to take with you.
| Where it lives | The license you grant | What you can leave with |
|---|---|---|
| A “non‑exclusive, transferable, sub‑licensable, royalty‑free and worldwide” license to host, distribute, modify and create derivative works of your content [1]. | Your copyright, and a data download. Not the address, not the audience, not the page. | |
| Twitter / X | A “worldwide, non‑exclusive, royalty‑free” license to use the content in any and all media, with the right to sub‑license [1]. | The same. |
| TikTok | An “unconditional, irrevocable, non‑exclusive, royalty‑free, fully transferable, perpetual worldwide license” to TikTok and third parties, extending to your name and likeness [1]. | The same. |
| This arrangement | To GitHub: what is necessary to run the service, plus AI features with an opt‑out [2]. To the public: whatever your license file says — see F6. | The domain, the files, and the working site. Everything except the host, which is replaceable. |
Read the first column and the third together. The licenses differ in breadth, but the decisive column is the last one: on a platform there is nothing to leave with, because the address was never yours.
If a site was built for you under the Washakie County pilot program, ownership is not a feeling about the arrangement. It is four specific transfers, and you should expect all four in writing.
Until those have happened the site is not yours, however friendly the arrangement is. Ask for the date.
It is not legal advice, and it is not written by a lawyer. It is a plain description of documents that are public, each one linked below so you can read the original rather than trust the summary — which is the same standard the rest of these sites hold themselves to.
Terms change without announcement, and the summaries here were read on the date in the footer. Anything that actually matters to you — a dispute, a transfer that goes wrong, a competitor copying your pages — is a question for a lawyer in your own jurisdiction, not for a web page.
[1] Intellectual property and social media — European Commission, Executive Agency for Small and Medium‑sized Enterprises, 23 January 2020. Sets out that users retain copyright on every major platform, and quotes the license each one takes in return.
[2] GitHub Terms of Service — GitHub, Inc. The provisions quoted are in section D (user‑generated content) and the termination section.
[3] Registrants' Benefits and Responsibilities — ICANN. What a domain registrant is entitled to from a registrar, including the process for transferring a name away.
[4] Facebook's own terms of service are not cited directly here, and could not be: four attempts to fetch pages on facebook.com from an ordinary web client on 24 September 2026 — including the terms page itself — were refused by its robots file. That is why source [1] is a European Commission summary rather than the document itself, and it is the subject of the Facebook answer on the front page.