FAC Content Use Policy
This website belonging to the First Amendment coalition (FAC), a section 501(C)(3) nonprofit organization, contains both original content (produced by FAC staff and persons assisting FAC on various matters) as well as content produced by others (and not owned by FAC). The latter category consists mainly of news articles and opinion pieces on First Amendment, freedom of information, censorship, government secrecy and related topics, published on newspapers’ websites and other news sources around the web. These are found in the “First Amendment news” section of this website.
Because of the number of news items involved (and our limited resources), we don’t try to obtain advance permission for the use of these materials. However, because of FAC’s unusual mission, our noncompetitive and noncommercial use of others’ content, and the steps that we take to protect copyright holders’ interests, we expect that most content owners—once they stop and think about how we use their content—will not object. That has been our experience to date. Nonetheless, owners who object to our use of their content are urged to contact us directly. We will, of course, respect their wishes.
FAC is not a news aggregator trying to profit off of others’ work. There is no advertising on this website. While we are not indifferent to internet traffic, our objective in drawing people to FAC’s website is to maximize the use of our free legal information and legal consultation services–which are used heavily by journalists from the very news organizations whose content is republished here.
FAC’s use of third-party content also creates a one-of-a-kind collection of news stories about important developments concerning open-government, FOI and freedom of speech. This unique content resource has no value commercially. However, it is useful to the relatively small community of people who care about these issues–including, most importantly, journalists.
We go out of our way at FAC to give credit to reporters and publishers (and to send our small audience to the websites of content owners). The sources of all news articles are highlighted (listed at the top of the item, with a link back to the original). Bylines are retained. Also, we add a copyright notice (naming the news source as copyright owner) on each item.
Finally, we believe in reciprocity. Content owners from whom FAC borrows content may also use, on their websites, FAC’s original content free of charge.
Thank you.
