check-the-licence-before-you-copy

check-the-licence-before-you-copy is a skill for Claude Code from everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering. It costs 49 tokens per session (1,164 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A licence-checking guide for reusing code, prompts, configuration, or other project material. A licence is the legal permission that states how someone else's work may be copied or published.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before copying third-party work, including work from public repositories, and before publishing or repackaging it.
Why use it?
It prevents reuse or publication without meeting the original author's conditions, such as providing attribution.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the claude-code-engineering plugin — 53 skills, 1 command, 8 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it before copying third-party work, including work from public repositories, and…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/check-the-licence-before-you-copy
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering --skill check-the-licence-before-you-copy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-code-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 53 skills, 1 command, 8 agents, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for check-the-licence-before-you-copy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/check-the-licence-before-you-copy.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/check-the-licence-before-you-copy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/check-the-licence-before-you-copy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/check-the-licence-before-you-copy.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,164 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00049 $0.01164
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00582
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00233
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00116

Measured 6d ago against content hash 043a0342a084, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

check-the-licence-before-you-copy scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/check-the-licence-before-you-copy/SKILL.md · 100 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 100 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Check the licence before you copy

Most permissive licences ask for one thing in return: say where it came from. That is a small price, and it is broken constantly — not out of bad faith, but because attribution is added once and then quietly erased by the next rename, refactor or repackaging.

🔴 Attribution is not a courtesy. It is the condition under which you were allowed to have the code. Publish MIT-licensed work without its notice and you are distributing it without a licence.

When to use this

  • Copying a file, a skill, a prompt, a config or a snippet from another project
  • Vendoring a dependency instead of installing it
  • Publishing something that contains any of the above
  • Renaming, moving or repackaging a project that already carries third-party work
  • An agent produced code that looks suspiciously like a known library

The procedure

1. Find the licence before you copy, not after. If there is no LICENSE file, no SPDX header and nothing in the README, you have no licence — not a permissive one. "Public repository" is not a licence. Ask, or do not copy.

2. Read what it actually requires. For the common permissive ones it is short:

Licence What you must do to redistribute
MIT / BSD / ISC Keep the licence text and the copyright line
Apache-2.0 The above, plus keep NOTICE if there is one, and state changes
MPL / LGPL Above, plus keep the covered files' source available
GPL / AGPL The whole work becomes copyleft — think before, not after
CC BY / CC BY-SA Credit the author; SA also forces the same licence onward
No licence at all You have no right to redistribute. None.

3. Put the attribution in three places, because one is not survivable.

  • The licence text, verbatim, in a LICENSES/ directory. Never summarised.
  • A third-party section in NOTICE, saying what came from where.
  • A line in each file you took, naming the origin and the copyright holder.

Read the full file on GitHub · 100 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 100 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 043a0342a084

Subscribe to this mod's changes

check-the-licence-before-you-copy is a skill published in the GitHub repository everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering (2 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 1,164 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

extendr-bindings

extendr conventions for exposing a Rust core to R: extendr macros and module registration, Robj type mapping, NA handling, rextendr builds, R package scaffolding, and CRAN compliance. Load when generating or reviewing extendr R bindings for a Rust library.

Goldziher/ai-rulez · 60 tokens

r-conventions

R code conventions covering R 4.1+, tidyverse/base style, styler/lintr, roxygen2, testthat, error handling, input validation, C/C++/Rust interop, and CRAN compliance. Load when writing or reviewing R code.

Goldziher/ai-rulez · 59 tokens

claude-project-manifest

Creates annotated bibliography-style manifests for Claude projects, tracking files, conversation threads, and relationships with unique IDs and annotations. Use when documenting project contents, creating file inventories, tracking conversation history, or building navigable knowledge maps.

organvm-iv-taxis/a-i--skills · 50 tokens

sec-plain-english

Draft, rewrite, or audit investor-facing financial and legal disclosure using an independently expressed interpretation of official SEC plain-English guidance. Use for prospectus summaries, risk factors, shareholder letters, offering materials, and securities disclosures that must be easier to understand without…

Neeeophytee/agent-stylebooks · 67 tokens

proofpress

Preserve or inspect decision history for Markdown and static HTML knowledge artifacts with Proofpress. Use when creating or accepting a meaningful revision to an ADR, design doc, PRD, README, strategy note, portable .md artifact, or static .html/.htm artifact in a configured repository, or when receiving a file…

chenmingtang830/proofpress · 82 tokens

full-after-care

Tiefe Pflegerunde für ein veröffentlichtes GitHub-Repository (Stufe 2): enthält den vollständigen surface-after-care-Durchlauf und ergänzt ihn um drei teure Schritte — rechtliche Ersteinschätzung über die Law-Checker mit Wiedervorlage nach einem Jahr (Gutachten bleibt gitignored im Repo), Querverweise zu verwandten…

ellmos-ai/skills · 196 tokens