For publishers and rights holders
Stak Technologies, Inc. · Seattle, Washington · Updated September 2026
Pepper is an Android app that lets people search reference documents on their phone with no connection — on a farm, in a rural area, anywhere without a reliable signal. Alongside the documents people import themselves, Pepper offers a library of reference documents they can download. This page explains how documents in that library are used, how your work is credited, and how to reach us about it.
What goes into the library
We only include a document when we are allowed to share it:
- works in the public domain, such as publications by US federal agencies;
- works under an open licence that allows it, such as Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA); or
- works whose rights holder has given us written permission.
We do not include material under non-commercial or no-derivatives licences unless the rights holder has given us written permission. Before a document is added we record where its licence or permission is stated, and we keep any permission we receive on file with the document.
How your documents appear
- The text is kept verbatim, split into passages so it can be searched.
- Every passage is shown with the document's title, authors, publisher, publication date and a link to your original.
- An assistant that runs on the phone may quote or summarise passages to answer a question, and it always cites the document the answer came from. When a document does not support an answer, Pepper says so rather than inventing one.
- Library documents contain text only; photographs and figures are not included.
- We never present your work as Pepper's own, and nothing in the app suggests that you endorse Pepper.
Updates, removal and withdrawal
- We refresh our copy when you publish a revision; telling us about one helps us do it sooner.
- Ask us to correct or remove a document and we will do so promptly once we have confirmed the request.
- If you withdraw a permission you gave us, we stop offering the document right away.
So that there are no surprises: Pepper works offline, so a document someone has already downloaded is stored on their phone. Removing a document from the library stops new downloads, but copies already on people's phones stay there.
Commercial use
Pepper is free to download, and some features are part of a paid subscription. That makes our use of library documents commercial use, which is why we ask for permission whenever a licence does not already allow it.
Who we are
Pepper is published by Stak Technologies, Inc., which is why our addresses end in stak.cc. Pepper is a separate product from Stak, the company's construction software; the two are unrelated apart from sharing the company for business purposes.
Contact
For permissions, corrections, removal requests or questions about how a document is used, email pepper-support@stak.cc with “Publisher request” in the subject, and include the document's title.
Other links
- Terms of service — section 6 covers content packs
- Privacy policy