DMCA & Copyright Policy

This page covers copyright in both directions: what we own, and what to do if you think something here belongs to you. Last updated: August 2026.

We take it seriously in the ordinary way, because reporting costs money and the archive is the only asset this newsroom has. We take it seriously in the other direction too. A takedown notice is a fast way to remove an accurate story, so the process below is written to be followed exactly.

What we own

The reporting, headlines, question indexes, the photographs and graphics we commission, and the arrangement of the site are our copyright or licensed to us. Third-party material appears under licence, with permission, or as fair quotation with attribution.

Reuse beyond quotation needs permission: republishing a story in full, translating and reposting it, pulling our feed into another site, putting our text through a rewriter, and any use of our content to train or ground a machine-learning model. The reasoning behind the last one is in our terms of service.

Quoting us, which we like

Quote a paragraph or two, name FAQ Answers, and link to the story you took it from. No permission needed and no email required.

The line that matters is whether a reader still has a reason to reach the original. A full copy with the byline stripped says nothing about where the answer came from, which is the part readers need to check us.

Reprints, syndication and licensing

Write to support@faq-ans.com with COPYRIGHT in the subject line. Tell us which stories you want, where they would appear, whether the use is commercial, and for how long. Educational and non-profit requests are usually free. Commercial republication is priced, and not highly.

Every licence carries one condition: if we correct or update a story, the licensee carries the correction. That is not a formality we forget to enforce, and the reasoning is in our corrections policy.

Sending us a takedown notice

If you own copyright in something published here without your permission, or you are authorised to act for the owner, send us a notice under 17 U.S.C. section 512. Send that first: a notice with the required parts starts the clock and a general complaint does not.

The statute is specific about what a notice contains, so the list below is law rather than preference. Leave a part out and we have to come back for it.

1. Your physical or electronic signature.
2. Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed. Where there are several, a representative list is enough.
3. Identification of the material you say is infringing, with enough detail for us to find it. A full URL for each page, and where a page carries several items, which item you mean.
4. Your contact details: name, postal address, telephone number and email address.
5. A statement that you have a good faith belief the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
6. A statement that the information in your notice is accurate and that, under penalty of perjury, you are the owner or authorised to act for the owner.

If your material is here under an expired licence, or credited to the wrong person, say that instead of filing a takedown. Those are usually fixed the same day.

Where notices go, and what happens next

Notices reach us at support@faq-ans.com with DMCA at the front of the subject line. The agent designated to receive them is our managing editor, who reads that inbox rather than routing it onward. Email is the only channel. There is no phone line here that anybody is watching, and we would rather tell you that than print a number that rings out.

We acknowledge a notice within two working days and say then whether it is complete. On a valid notice we act expeditiously, which in practice means removal within a few working days and usually sooner.

Where the material is a photograph or an embed, that item comes down rather than the whole story, because deleting a page is a way of making our own reporting unfindable. If a reader submission is the problem, we remove it and tell the person who posted it why.

If we removed your material by mistake

Anyone whose submission has been removed can send a counter-notification. It needs your signature, identification of the material and where it sat before removal, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith it was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification, and your name, address and telephone number.

It also needs 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 where this site may be found, plus your agreement to accept service of process from whoever sent the original notice. We forward a valid counter-notification to the complainant, and unless they tell us they have gone to court, the material goes back up between 10 and 14 business days later.

Repeat infringers

Reader submissions are covered by a repeat-infringer policy, and it is a count rather than a mood. Two notices we act on gets a warning. A third closes the account, and we do not reopen it under a new display name.

The same applies to us. A contributor who supplies material they do not hold the rights to stops working with us, which is what the plagiarism rule in our editorial standards produces anyway.

Notices sent in bad faith

Section 512(f) makes anyone who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that it was removed by mistake, liable for damages including costs and legal fees. We mention it because notices arrive from people whose real objection is the story rather than the picture in it.

Those we refuse, in writing, with the reason. Copyright is not a route to unpublishing accurate reporting. If you want a factual claim changed, show us the claim is wrong at support@faq-ans.com. That is faster, and it works.