Terms of Service

These are the rules for using The iBulletin. They are shorter than most, because the site does very little: it publishes bulletins, it sends an email, and it sells advertising. Reading the site means you accept what is below. Last updated: August 2026.

Who these terms apply to

They apply to anybody who uses the site, however you arrived. They also apply to software: a crawler is somebody’s agent, so the terms bind whoever set it running.

Any age can read a bulletin. You must be at least 16 to subscribe to the email bulletin or send us material, and you need the capacity to accept an agreement of this kind. If you are accepting for a company, you are confirming you can bind it. If you do not accept these terms, do not use the site.

What we own, and what you may do without asking

The bulletins, the headlines, our own photographs and graphics, the site design and the arrangement of the material are ours, protected by copyright whether or not a notice appears on the page. Some material is licensed in from other people, whose rights stay with them. How to ask for a reprint is on our DMCA and copyright page.

What you may do without asking is most of what a reader wants. Print a bulletin for yourself. Send the link to a colleague. Quote a sentence or two with our name attached and a live link back. Linking is always fine and never needs permission. Framing our pages so our work looks like your content is not linking.

Scraping, and training a model on our work

This one is worth spelling out. A bulletin here is what other sites put in the summary box at the top of a long article. No atmosphere, no recap, no standing context paragraph, nothing in it that is not the story. Take the two hundred words and you have taken the piece rather than a snippet of it. A system that ingests our bulletins and emits them in its own voice has not summarised our work. It has moved it.

So the rule is a written agreement or nothing. We do not permit our content to be collected in bulk, used as training or fine-tuning data, held in a retrieval corpus, or used to ground the output of a commercial system. We reserve our rights expressly for text and data mining, including in machine-readable form, and our robots.txt is part of that reservation rather than a polite request.

None of that is hostility towards machine reading. We will licence, the rates are not high, and research use is usually free. Write to support@theibulletin.com with COPYRIGHT in the subject line. What is not allowed:

• Automated or bulk collection beyond what our robots.txt permits, including crawling that costs us hosting.
• Using bulletins to train, fine-tune, evaluate or ground a machine-learning system without a written agreement.
• Republishing a bulletin in full or in substantial part, in any language, on any platform.
• Framing or inlining our pages so our work appears to belong to somebody else.
• Removing or altering a byline, a source link, a correction note or the word Sponsored.
• Publishing an altered version of our text under our name, or using our name to imply endorsement.
• Spoofing our domain in an advertising bid request, or otherwise selling inventory as ours.
• Probing, load testing or interfering with the site or its security.

What you send us

Tips, corrections, letters, documents and photographs all arrive at one address. Anything you send may be published or quoted unless you tell us before sending that it is not for publication, and we honour that. If sending it puts you at risk, write a short message first saying what protection you need.

By sending material you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to publish it, edit it for length and clarity, archive it and syndicate it. You keep ownership. You confirm you have the right to send it and that publishing it would not breach somebody else’s copyright. We do not pay for unsolicited material unless agreed in writing.

We do not run comment threads on bulletins today. If we open them, the rules will be the ones we apply to mail we might publish: no harassment, no other people’s personal details, nothing defamatory, no spam, no impersonation. We can remove or decline anything without notice, we are under no duty to monitor, and what a reader wrote stays theirs rather than becoming a view of ours.

Other people’s links, embeds and material

We link out constantly, because attribution requires it and a reader is owed the primary document. A link is not an endorsement or a warranty about what sits on the other end. Those pages change after we link them, and once you follow one you are on somebody else’s site under their terms.

The same goes for embedded material, a court filing in a document viewer or a broadcaster’s clip, which may set its own storage in your browser. Our cookie policy covers what that means. Advertising is third-party material too, labelled as such, and its presence is never an endorsement by us.

No warranty, and what we will not carry

Everything here is provided as it is. We publish in good faith and check what we publish, as our fact-checking process describes, but we do not warrant that a bulletin is complete, that the site will be available without interruption, or that it fits a purpose you have in mind. The longer version is our disclaimer.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profit, or a decision you took on the strength of a bulletin, whether a trade, a purchase, a legal step or a health decision. Where liability cannot be excluded it is limited to what you paid us for access, which on a free site is nothing. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or removes a consumer right your local law does not let you waive.

If you use the site in breach of these terms and it costs us money, in legal fees or in hosting bills run up by a crawler, we will ask you to cover it. That is what an indemnity is, said plainly.

Blocking access

We can rate-limit, block an address or a user agent, refuse a crawler, remove a submission or cancel a subscription where these terms are broken. Automated abuse is blocked without notice, because there is nobody to notify.

If you are a reader blocked in error, email us and we will look at it. We do not run a formal appeals process, because a team this size cannot staff one. Our contact page explains how to label a message so it lands the same day.

Governing law, disputes and changes

These terms are governed by the law applicable where the publisher is established, and the courts there have jurisdiction. Where you are a consumer, that does not take away a mandatory right, or a local forum, your own law gives you. If a provision here is unenforceable the rest stands, and not enforcing a rule once is not a waiver.

Before anything formal, write to us. Most complaints about a news site are factual, and a factual error gets looked at the same day under our corrections policy rather than becoming a legal matter. Otherwise we will try to settle directly within 30 days of your first email.

These terms change when the site changes, and the date at the top moves with them. A material change gets a short note saying what it was. Continuing to use the site after that means accepting the new version.