DMCA & Copyright Policy

This page covers two things: what you may do with our work, and what to do if you think something on our site is yours. Both go to the same address and both are answered by a person. Last updated: August 2026.

What we own, and what you can do without asking

The bulletins, the headlines, our own photographs and graphics, the site design and the arrangement of the material are ours, and copyright applies whether or not a notice sits on the page. Some of what appears here belongs to other people, an agency photograph for instance, whose rights stay with them.

Plenty needs no conversation. Link to us, always, without permission. Quote a sentence or two with our name on it and a live link back. Print a copy for your own use or teach from one in a classroom. If we got there first on a story you are covering, credit and a link is all we ask, as we do for outlets that beat us.

What needs permission is republication: posting a bulletin whole or nearly whole, translating it, dropping it into your newsletter or app, rewriting it from the top as your reporting, or feeding it to a model as training data. Our bulletins run a couple of hundred words with nothing in them that is not the story, so quoting one heavily is not quoting, it is taking the piece. The scraping rules are on our terms of service.

Reprints, syndication and licensing

We licence our copy and it is not expensive. Write to support@theibulletin.com with COPYRIGHT at the front of the subject line and say which bulletin, where it will appear, for how long, and whether the use is commercial. An answer comes inside two working days. Educational and non-commercial requests usually get a yes and no invoice.

Some uses we will not licence at any price. Anything implying we endorse a product. Anything inside advertising or promotional material. Republication under somebody else’s byline, the thing our founding editors spent years watching done to other people on rewrite desks. Machine-training licences are considered in writing only, never granted by silence or by robots.txt being ignored.

Sending us a takedown notice

If you own copyright in something published here without permission, tell us. We would rather hear from you than from a lawyer. Most of these turn out to be a photograph credited to the wrong agency or a licence that expired unnoticed, and those get fixed the same day.

Notices go to our designated agent for copyright complaints, a role held by our managing editor, at support@theibulletin.com with DMCA at the front of the subject line. Where a notice needs the publisher’s registered particulars, ask and we will send them. To be effective under 17 U.S.C. section 512(c)(3), a notice must contain all of the following:

Identification of the copyrighted work said to be infringed, or a representative list if several.
Identification of the material you want removed, with the address of each page it appears on.
Your name, postal address, telephone number and email address.
A statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
A statement that the notice is accurate, and that under penalty of perjury you are the owner of the right or authorised to act for the owner.
Your physical or electronic signature.

An incomplete notice is not a trap here. If something is missing we tell you what, and hold the complaint open while you send it.

What happens after a valid notice

You get an acknowledgement within two working days and usually sooner. Where the claim is clear we act expeditiously, in practice immediately, by removing the material, disabling access, or swapping an image out while we check the paperwork. Where the work is ours and we think the claim mistaken, we say so and explain why.

Where the material came from a reader, we tell that person what was claimed and forward your notice, contact details included, because the statute requires it. Send only what you are content to have passed on. If the fault was ours, a wrong credit or a lapsed licence, we correct it on the story under our corrections policy.

Counter-notification

If material of yours was removed and you believe it was licensed, authorised or misidentified, send a counter-notice to the same address with COUNTER-NOTICE at the front of the subject line. It carries the same weight as the original complaint and it is a legal document, so do not send one to make a point.

It has to include your signature, identification of the material removed and where it appeared, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith the removal was a mistake or misidentification, your name, address and telephone number, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the appropriate federal court plus your agreement to accept service from the complainant. We forward it. If they do not tell us within ten to fourteen business days that they have gone to court, we may restore the material.

Repeat notices, and false ones

For anything a reader can send us, we terminate the ability to submit where somebody is the subject of repeated valid infringement notices, and delete what is outstanding. There is no published strike count: the volume of reader material here is small, and a numbered policy borrowed from a platform at scale would be theatre.