DMCA & Copyright Policy
Where we stand on copyright
MMJ GAZETTE is a publisher, so copyright cuts both ways for us: we hold rights in what we produce, and we respect the rights of everyone whose work our reporting touches, from photographers to journal publishers. This page explains how we use others’ material, how to complain if you believe we have used yours improperly, and how the formal takedown process works. Copyright notices go to support@mmjgazette.com with “DMCA” or “Copyright” in the subject line.
How we use third-party material
Our articles quote from studies, court filings, regulatory documents, and statements in the ordinary course of news reporting, within the bounds of fair use and equivalent doctrines: brief excerpts, attributed, for the purpose of reporting and commentary. Government documents in the public domain are used as public domain. Images are either our own, licensed, supplied for editorial use, or used under an applicable exception, with credit where the license requires it. If we embed or link to third-party content, the rights remain with the owner.
If you believe we have infringed your work
Tell us before you escalate; most disputes are resolved in one email. Often the issue is a missing credit or a licensing misunderstanding, and we fix those quickly. If you prefer to proceed formally, send a takedown notice containing the elements below. We honor properly supported notices whether or not the sender is in a jurisdiction where the DMCA itself applies.
- Identification of the copyrighted work you claim is infringed, or a representative list if there are several.
- Identification of the material on our site you claim is infringing, with the exact URL of each page, so we can find it.
- Your name, postal address, telephone number, and email address.
- A statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
- A statement that the information in the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the owner of the right claimed or authorized to act for the owner.
- Your physical or electronic signature.
On receiving a complete notice we will review it promptly, remove or disable access to material we agree is infringing, and tell you what we did. If a notice is incomplete we will say what is missing rather than ignoring it. Please note that a takedown notice is a legal statement: knowingly misrepresenting that material is infringing can expose the sender to liability, so complaints should be sent only by or for the actual rights holder.
Counter-notices
If material you posted or supplied was removed and you believe the removal was mistaken, you may send a counter-notice containing: identification of the removed material and where it appeared; a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed by mistake or misidentification; your name, address, and telephone number; consent to the jurisdiction of the courts where you are located, or where we are established if you are outside that reach; and your signature. We will forward valid counter-notices to the original complainant and may restore the material if the dispute is not taken to court within the statutory window applicable to the notice.
Repeat infringers
If the site carries user-submitted content and an account or contributor repeatedly infringes copyright, we will terminate their access. In practice this site is written by its own small team, so this clause exists mostly for completeness, but it is policy nonetheless.
Our content, and reuse of it
Original articles, headlines, and graphics on this site are our copyrighted work. You are welcome to link to any article, quote brief passages with attribution and a link back, and share pages on social platforms. You may not republish whole articles, translate and republish them, mirror the site, or feed our archive into a commercial product without written permission, which you can request at support@mmjgazette.com. If you find our work republished without credit elsewhere, we would be glad to hear about it.
A note on what copyright does not cover
Facts are not copyrightable, and we make no claim over the facts we report. A regulation’s text, a study’s findings, the outcome of a vote: these belong to everyone. What we claim is the expression, the particular articles we wrote. Anyone is free to report the same facts in their own words, as we would expect of any newsroom, including the two sentences of credit that good practice suggests.
