Other people's papers, our own words.

Everything Quimbo writes itself — the course summaries, the practice questions and their worked answers, the design, the interface text and the underlying code — is an original literary or artistic work protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA 1988). The copyright in that material is owned by Quimbo, © 2026, and all rights are reserved except where this policy says otherwise.

We also assert our moral right under sections 77 to 80 CDPA 1988 to be identified as the author of that material and to object to any derogatory treatment of it.

Question papers, marking instructions, course specifications and every other document published by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (now Qualifications Scotland) are literary works under section 1 CDPA 1988. The rights in them — including the restricted acts of copying (section 17), issuing copies to the public (section 18) and communicating the work to the public (section 20) — belong to that organisation, not to us.

Quimbo does not reproduce, store, mirror, re-host or adapt those documents. Each paper link opens the PDF published on sqa.org.uk in a new tab, so you read the original on the rights holder's own site, under their terms. No link here grants you any licence over the file behind it.

Under Article 3 of Directive 2001/29/EC, the right of communication to the public covers making a work available in a way the rights holder did not authorise. The Court of Justice of the European Union has held that linking to a work which is freely accessible on another site, with the rights holder's consent, is not a new communication to the public (Svensson, C-466/12; BestWater, C-348/13). Linking to material that has been posted without permission can infringe where the linker knew or ought to have known that (GS Media, C-160/15).

That is why every paper on Quimbo is a plain link to the publisher's own public PDF. We do not frame, embed, strip, bypass or circumvent any access control, and we never present another organisation's document as our own.

The EU framework we align with is Directive 2001/29/EC (the Information Society Directive), Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases, and Directive (EU) 2019/790 (the Digital Single Market Directive). The DSM Directive introduced a press publishers' right (Article 15) and a specific liability regime for large online content-sharing platforms (Article 17).

Quimbo is neither a press publisher nor an online content-sharing service: it publishes no third-party uploads, hosts no user-posted works and earns nothing from advertising. Those provisions therefore do not apply to it. In the UK, the DSM Directive was not implemented, and it did not form part of the law retained by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 — so the position here is governed by the CDPA 1988 as it stands, read together with the rest of the retained EU case law above.

Directive 96/9/EC and the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997 also protect the investment in a database. We take no substantial part of any third party's database, and the course catalogue we present is compiled by us from publicly published course information.

Where Quimbo refers to another organisation's material — quoting a command word, naming a course, summarising a published specification — it does so within the fair dealing exceptions in the CDPA 1988: quotation and criticism or review (section 30), research and private study (section 29), and illustration for instruction (section 32). Those exceptions are purpose-limited. They are not a general 'fair use' right, and they do not permit reproducing a substantial part of a work.

Copyright protects expression, not facts or ideas. Course names, mark tariffs and the fact that a topic is examined are facts; the wording of a question paper is expression. Quimbo presents the facts in its own words and does not copy the expression.

You may read, print and download pages of Quimbo for your own personal revision, and teachers may reproduce our course summaries and practice questions for use with their own classes, provided the source is acknowledged and the material is not sold.

You may quote a short extract — a sentence or two — with clear attribution to Quimbo and a link back to the page it came from. That quotation right applies to our original material only; it gives you nothing over the SQA documents we link to.

Without our written permission you may not republish our guides or practice tests in whole or in substantial part, mirror or bulk-download the site, feed our material into another product or dataset, sell or licence it, or present it as official, endorsed or SQA-approved.

You must not remove or obscure any copyright notice, attribution or disclaimer on the site, or use the names Quimbo, SQA, National 5, Higher or Advanced Higher in a way that suggests approval, partnership or official status. Those names are the trade marks of their respective owners (Trade Marks Act 1994) and are used here only descriptively, to say which course a page is about.

Quimbo lets you pin subjects to your own page. That is a preference, not a work of authorship, and we claim no rights over it. We host no uploads, comments, forums or user-posted documents, so there is no user-generated content for us to licence, moderate or defend.

If a future feature lets you submit something, this policy will say so before it goes live, and we will not take rights in your work beyond what is needed to display it on the site.

If you hold rights in anything linked from or written on this site and you believe it infringes your copyright, email us with the work concerned, the page or link on Quimbo, and the basis of your claim. We investigate every notice and remove or amend the material promptly where a claim is made out — no argument needed.

Quimbo is a passive host of its own content and merely links to third-party documents; it does not store third-party material, so the hosting defence in regulations 17 to 19 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 and the innocent-infringement provisions of section 97 CDPA 1988 support a prompt takedown in place of damages. Where a link is reported as pointing to material posted without the rights holder's consent, we will remove the link rather than risk facilitating infringement.

The same address handles a broken paper link, a wrong answer in a practice test or a typo in a course guide.