DMCA & Copyright Policy
This page covers copyright in both directions: what we own, and what to do if you think something we published infringes work of yours. The takedown procedure follows United States copyright law at 17 U.S.C. section 512, and we apply it to claims from anywhere else.
Most copyright mail we get is not a dispute. It is somebody asking whether they can reprint a story, or a photographer pointing out that a credit is wrong.
What we own
Original reporting, headlines, article text, our charts, commissioned photography, the page design and the code that runs the site are our copyright unless a credit says otherwise. Publishing them free to read is not the same as giving them away.
Reuse beyond personal reading needs permission. That covers republishing a story in full, translating it, putting it inside an app or a paid newsletter, feeding it into a commercial dataset, and using the archive as training data for a generative model. The scraping prohibition sits in our terms of service, and we reserve our text and data mining rights expressly rather than by implication.
Quoting us, and linking to us
Quote away. A paragraph or two with our name on it and a link to the original story is welcome, and it is how the web is supposed to work.
The line we enforce is between quotation and substitution. Lifting a whole piece, or enough of it that nobody needs to open the story, is republication whatever the credit says. Rewriting our reporting sentence by sentence and crediting it in the last line is the same act performed politely. We notice, and we ask for it to come down.
Reprints, syndication and licences
If you want more than a quote, ask. Write to support@blueholemen.com with the story link, where it would appear, whether the use is commercial, and how long you need it for. Requests from teachers, students, researchers and other small newsrooms are usually approved, often for nothing, and answered within a few days.
Commercial syndication and model training licences are priced, which is not a moral position on either. Somebody was paid to read the decision notice the story rests on. Advertising enquiries go through our advertising page instead.
Sending us a takedown notice
If you own copyright in material published here, or are authorised to act for the owner, send your notice to support@blueholemen.com with DMCA at the front of the subject line. The designated agent for copyright notices is our managing editor, who reads that inbox with the other editors. We publish no postal address and no telephone number, so email is the route and a notice arriving there is treated as properly served. If you need our entity and service details for a formal filing, ask in the same message.
A valid notice has to contain all of the following, and anything missing slows the whole thing down.
- A physical or electronic signature from you.
- Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed, or a representative list of the works where there are several.
- Identification of the material on our site that you say infringes it, with enough detail for us to find it: the page address, and which paragraph, image or file.
- Your contact details, including an address, a telephone number and an email address we can reach you at.
- 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 information in your notice is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the copyright owner or authorised to act on the owner’s behalf.
What happens once we have it
We acknowledge a notice within two working days and aim to decide within five. Where the notice is valid, the material comes down or gets replaced quickly, the writer and the editor who cleared the piece are told, and the story carries a note if a reader would notice the change. Our corrections policy covers how those notes are written.
Not every notice ends in removal. A short attributed quotation, a link, a screenshot used to report on the thing it shows, or a photograph we hold a licence for are lawful uses, and we will explain that rather than delete a story to avoid an argument. Where a notice is really about a subject disliking coverage, copyright is the wrong tool and we say so.
Counter-notification
If we removed something of yours and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, send a counter-notice to the same address. It needs your signature, identification of the material and the address it appeared at before it came down, and a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief it was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
It also needs your name, address and telephone number, your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the district where you live, or if you are outside the United States any district in which we may be found, and your agreement to accept service of process from whoever sent the original notice. We pass a valid counter-notice to that party, and unless they tell us they have gone to court for an order restraining the material, it goes back up between 10 and 14 business days after we received it.
False notices, and repeat infringers
A takedown notice is a legal document. Section 512(f) makes anyone who knowingly misrepresents that material is infringing liable for the damages and costs that follow, our legal fees included, and a counter-notice sent in bad faith carries the same exposure. An honest mistake is not worth chasing. A notice sent to bury a story is a different matter.
For material readers post, we run a repeat infringer policy. An account attracting valid notices loses the ability to comment, permanently on a third occasion and sooner where the copying was deliberate. Every notice and decision is logged with its date, which is the only reason a pattern ever becomes visible.
Last updated: August 2026
