DMCA & Copyright Policy
This page does two jobs. It says what we own and what reusing it requires, and it gives rights holders a route to us if something of theirs has appeared here without permission.
Both halves matter for the same reason. A small newsroom lives on the value of its own copy, so we are in no position to be careless with anybody else’s.
What we own, and what needs asking
Everything original on this domain belongs to us or is licensed to us: the articles, the headlines, the photography we commission, the charts, the newsletter, and the way the site is put together. Third-party material appears under licence or as fair dealing, credited to whoever made it, and those rights stay with them.
Reading, printing a copy for yourself and sending a link need no permission. Anything that puts our work in front of an audience of yours does: republication, translation, reading an article aloud in a video or a podcast, or using it as training material for a machine learning system. That last one is argued out in our terms of service, and the answer is no without a written licence.
Quoting us, and getting a reprint
Quote us. Genuinely. Take a paragraph, name The Little Binger in the sentence that uses it, and link to the article, which is what we do when another outlet breaks a story we follow.
The line is where the quote replaces the article. If somebody can read your version and have no reason to open ours, that is republication whatever the length, and worse when the byline and the correction notice were stripped off on the way. We chase wholesale copies and the sites that run our copy through a rewriter. We do not chase a reader who pasted a paragraph into a forum argument.
Permission is available and it is not expensive. Write to support@thelittlebinger.com with the article, where you want to run it, for how long, and whether the use is commercial. Educational requests are usually granted for nothing. One condition attaches to every reprint: correction notices travel with the article, because a licensed copy fixed here and not there is what our corrections policy exists to prevent.
If you think we have used your work without permission
Tell us and it gets looked at rather than filed. Sometimes the honest answer is that a caption credit was dropped in production, which we fix in an hour. Sometimes it is a licensing dispute that needs paperwork. An email is quicker than a formal notice, and it reaches the single inbox described on our contact page.
We follow the notice and takedown procedure in section 512 of the US Copyright Act, because it is the clearest process available and rights holders know it. A valid notice must be in writing and contain all of the following.
- Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed, or a representative list where there are several.
- Identification of the material complained of, precise enough to find: the full URL and where on the page it sits.
- Your name, postal address, telephone number and email address, so we can reach you and whoever posted the material can be told who complained.
- 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 is accurate and that, under penalty of perjury, you are the owner or authorised to act for one.
- Your physical or electronic signature.
Send it to our designated copyright agent at support@thelittlebinger.com with the word copyright in the subject line. The role is filled by the editor on duty for legal notices, named by role rather than by person because the team is small and a name on a page goes stale in a way a role does not. Notices come out of that inbox by hand the same day.
What happens once a valid notice arrives
You get an acknowledgement inside one working day and a decision inside five. Where the notice is good the material comes down or is replaced while we work out what happened, and if the item was central to an article the page keeps its address and carries a note about what was removed.
Where a reader posted the material, we remove it and tell them what went and who asked. A notice missing one of the elements above is not ignored. We say which part is missing, because a photographer chasing a stolen image should not lose on a technicality.
Counter-notification
If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or that the use was licensed, you can send a counter-notice. It needs your signature, identification of what was removed and where it sat, your name, address and telephone number, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith the removal resulted from mistake or misidentification, and your consent to the jurisdiction of a court where you could be sued.
We pass a valid counter-notice to the original complainant. If they do not tell us within ten to fourteen business days that they have gone to court to stop you, the material can go back up. That period is set by the statute rather than by us.
Repeat infringers, and claims made in bad faith
Anybody who repeatedly posts infringing material in our comments loses access to them, and we do not need a court to establish a pattern we can already see. Those accounts are not reinstated.
The process also gets abused, and the statute anticipates it. Knowingly misrepresenting that material is infringing carries liability under section 512(f) for the damages and costs caused. A notice aimed at journalism somebody dislikes rather than at a copyright interest is usually recognisable from the first paragraph. We answer those on the merits, the article stays up, and that cost we have already accepted.
Last updated: August 2026.
