Terms of Service
These are the terms you agree to by using this site. Reading them is optional, being bound by them is not, so they are written in the language we use in the office, not that of a template.
Most of what follows is uncontroversial. One section is not, and it is the one about machines harvesting our copy.
Who these terms are for
They apply to anyone who loads a page, subscribes, comments or sends us anything, and using the site is your acceptance of them. If a clause here is unacceptable to you, the remedy is to close the tab: there is no account to cancel and nothing of yours held hostage.
Subscribing or commenting requires you to be old enough to enter a contract where you live. Reading has no age gate, though the site is written for adults and our coverage of courts, war and crime is not softened for younger readers. Using the site for a company means confirming you can bind it.
What you may do with our work
Everything published here is owned by us or licensed to us: the words, the headlines, the photography we commission, the newsletter, and the arrangement of the site itself. You get a personal, non-exclusive, non-commercial licence to read it, print it for yourself, and send a link to anybody.
Quoting is welcome and we do not police it stingily. Take a paragraph, attribute it to The Little Binger, and link to the article. What the licence does not cover is taking the whole piece, or so much of it that nobody needs to visit us, or running our copy in a newsletter or app of your own. Permission is available and cheap, by the route in our copyright policy.
Scraping, and machines trained on our copy
Our sentences are the entire product. No software business sits behind this site, no events arm, no consultancy. A small team writes articles and advertising against those articles pays for the next ones. So when a crawler takes the lot to train a system that answers a reader’s question in our words while the reader never arrives, it is not an abstract copyright problem to us. It is somebody removing the thing the wages come out of.
Access to this site grants no right to use its content for training, fine-tuning, evaluating or grounding any machine learning or generative system, and we reserve our rights against text and data mining under every law that allows a reservation. That covers collection by any means: a declared crawler, a rented residential proxy, or a browser extension quietly forwarding pages a real person opened. Ignoring our machine-readable directives is not a loophole, it is the act being described.
We know what the position costs. Being inside a chatbot’s answer sends some traffic back, and publishers who allow it are not fools. We would rather license the work, name the price and point at the deal. Until somebody asks, the answer is no, and it stays no for the operator who takes first and offers to talk later.
These uses are prohibited outright, and each has happened to us or to a site we know.
- Bulk or systematic downloading, crawling or copying of the site, including through a proxy or a scraping tool.
- Using our content to train, fine-tune, ground or benchmark a model without a written licence from us.
- Republishing our articles in whole or in substantial part, attributed or not.
- Framing our pages inside your own, altering our copy and leaving our name on it, or implying that we endorse you.
- Stripping bylines, dates, correction notices or sponsorship labels, all of which tell a reader something true.
- Defeating a rate limit or any measure protecting the site or its readers.
Comments and anything else you send us
Where comments are open the rules are short. No abuse of other readers, no threats, no material that is unlawful where it is read, no impersonating a real person, no spam, and no posting somebody else’s private information. Advertising in a thread is deleted without discussion, and the categories we refuse to sell space to, sportsbook creative and grey-market key resellers among them, are refused free of charge.
Moderation is a right rather than a promise. We do not read every comment before it appears, we remove what breaks the rules when we see it, and we may close a thread where the argument has stopped being about the story. Posting gives us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to publish your words here with your display name, and confirms they were yours. Tips and documents are handled under the confidentiality on our contact page.
What we do not promise, and what we do not control
The site and its contents are provided as they are, without warranty of any kind, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. We do not promise uninterrupted availability, a page free of error, or a file free of anything harmful.
None of that is a shrug at accuracy. How hard we work to be right is in our editorial standards, and the boundaries of what our reporting is are on the disclaimer page. We answer for our journalism as journalists, and cannot underwrite what a reader does with it.
We link out constantly, because a reader should be able to check the ruling rather than take our word for it. A link is a pointer to evidence, not an endorsement of the domain it points at. Embedded video and posts are served by somebody else, can vanish without warning, and set their own cookies, which our cookie policy covers.
Liability, indemnity, and losing access
To the extent the law allows where you are, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss arising from your use of the site, including lost profit, lost data and a decision you took because of something you read here. Where liability cannot be excluded it is limited to what you paid us for access, which on a free site is nothing.
If your use of the site brings a claim against us, whether from scraping, posting something you had no right to post, or another breach, you agree to cover the cost of dealing with it, including reasonable legal fees. Nothing here limits liability for death, personal injury or fraud.
We can also block an address, a network or an account that breaks these terms, and with a bulk scraper we do it first and discuss it afterwards. Comment privileges go the same way for repeated abuse, and there is no appeal process, only an email to a person who will read it. The licence you granted for anything you posted survives, along with the limits and the indemnity above.
Which law applies, and how a dispute is handled
These terms are governed by the law applicable at the publisher’s place of business, and a dispute goes to the courts with jurisdiction there. We have not named a convenient venue on the far side of the world, because a term nobody could realistically use is not a term.
Before anything becomes a legal matter, write to support@thelittlebinger.com and set out the problem. Most complaints arriving as legal threats turn out to be factual disputes, and those are answered faster by our corrections policy than by a solicitor’s letter. Consumer rights you hold where you live survive this section.
Changes to these terms
When these terms change the date below changes with them, and a change affecting your rights gets described rather than slipped in. Using the site afterwards is how you accept the new version.
We keep no public archive of past revisions, and will send you the version that applied on a particular date if you ask and it matters to something between us.
Last updated: August 2026.
