Terms of Service

These are the terms you accept by using blueholemen.com. They are the necessary dull contract between a small newsroom and everyone who reads it, and we have tried to write them in the same English as the rest of the site.

Nothing in here is designed to catch a reader out. Read the site, quote it, argue with it, mail us about it. The parts written with any force are aimed at bulk republishers and at crawlers harvesting the archive to train models.

Who may use the site, and what accepting means

Using the site means you accept these terms and our privacy policy. If you do not accept them the remedy is to close the tab, which costs you nothing.

You need to be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and at least 13 in any event. Posting a comment requires 16 or over, because moderating a child’s account properly is not something a newsroom this size can do. If you are using the site on behalf of an employer, you are confirming you have authority to accept these terms for it.

Our journalism belongs to us

The stories, headlines, photography we commissioned, charts, page design and the code behind the site are our copyright or licensed to us. Publishing them free to read is not the same as giving them away.

What you get is a licence to read. Personal, non-commercial use on any device, including printing a piece, saving it and sending it to somebody who needs it. Quoting is welcome too. Take a paragraph, attribute it to Blue Hole Men and link to the story it came from, and you will never hear from us. Our copyright policy covers reprints, syndication and how to ask for anything beyond that.

Scraping, and using our archive to train a model

This is the clause we actually care about, so it is written out properly rather than in template language.

You may not systematically copy this site. That covers crawling it into a database, mirroring it, extracting our headlines and opening paragraphs at volume for a feed, republishing whole articles anywhere, wrapping our pages in a frame with somebody else’s advertising around them, and passing our reporting off as another outlet’s work or as a machine’s. Automated access beyond a normal search engine crawl needs our written permission.

We expressly reserve our rights over text and data mining, including the reservation available to publishers under European copyright law, and we do not grant permission for this site or any part of the archive to be used as training data for generative models or sold into a commercial dataset. That reservation is stated here and machine-readably in the site’s robots file and response headers. Anyone who wants a licence can write to support@blueholemen.com and will get an answer, because a licence is a conversation about money and we are not above having it.

Here is why it matters to a site built the way ours is. A story here often exists because somebody spent a day reading a decision notice nobody else opened. A model trained on that answers the reader’s question without ever sending them to the document, and the document was the entire product. We know a clause in a terms page is a weak instrument against a crawler that ignores the rules. We are writing it down anyway, because it turns a quiet assumption into a decision somebody made, and decisions can be argued with.

Comments and anything else you send us

Comments are open on some stories and are read by editors. Keep it to argument. What comes down is abuse, threats, harassment, anything unlawful or defamatory, spam, links planted for search purposes, impersonation of a real person, and the same paragraph pasted onto forty stories in an afternoon.

What you write stays yours. By posting it, or sending it to us for publication, you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to publish it, edit it for length and clarity, store it and keep it in the archive, and you confirm it is your own work and breaches nobody else’s rights. We can remove or decline anything without holding a hearing, and a comment is not owed permanent shelf space. Tips and documents sent to the newsroom are handled under our editorial standards instead.

Links out, and things embedded in our pages

We link out constantly, because a story you cannot check is not much of a story. We also embed video, posts and official filings served from other companies.

None of that is an endorsement and none of it is ours to control. A page we linked to can change, vanish or turn into something we would never have linked to, and an embedded player arrives with its host’s own terms and cookies attached. Where an embed sets a cookie, our cookie policy explains how your consent choice affects it.

The site comes as it is

We publish in good faith, check what we publish and correct it when it is wrong. What we cannot do is warrant that every fact stays accurate as events move, that the site will be available without interruption, or that it suits whatever purpose you have in mind. To the extent the law allows, the site and everything on it is provided as is, without warranties of any kind, express or implied.

Our reporting is general information rather than financial, legal, medical or other professional advice. The disclaimer sets those boundaries out in more detail, and where something we published is wrong, our corrections policy is the route to getting it fixed on the story.

Liability, and what you take on

To the fullest extent permitted by law we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, lost data, or decisions taken on the strength of something you read here. Where liability cannot be excluded it is limited to the amount you paid us to read the site, which is nothing. Nothing in these terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

If a claim is brought against us because of something you posted, sent us for publication, or did with our content in breach of these terms, you agree to cover the costs and damages that follow. That clause exists for the small number of people who lift an archive and then forward the consequences to us. A reader losing an argument in a comment thread has nothing to worry about.

Losing access, and the law that applies

We can suspend or block access, close a comment account and take technical measures against a crawler where these terms are being broken, and a bulk scraper does not get a warning first. A reader whose comment account has been suspended gets an answer from an editor if they ask why, which almost nobody does.

These terms are governed by the law in force at the publisher’s place of business, and a dispute goes to the courts there. Before it reaches that point, write to support@blueholemen.com, because most mail that arrives as a threat turns out to be a correction, a permission question or a misunderstanding about a quote. Anyone with a legal reason to need our entity and service details can ask at the same address.

Changes to these terms

We update this page when the law changes or the site does, and the date at the foot moves with it. A material change is flagged on the site for a fortnight, and continuing to read after that is how acceptance works in practice.

We do not backdate. A change takes effect from the date shown, and any dispute about something that happened earlier is judged against the version live at the time. Ask us for that version if you need it.

Last updated: August 2026