Licence and reuse

A register nobody may quote is a register nobody uses. The record is meant to be cited, checked and built on, so the terms are stated plainly rather than left to be guessed at.

Case metadata is CC BY 4.0

Everything the register establishes itself is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International: case references, dates, locations, companies, categories, severity, incident type, escalation stage, the timeline of what followed, and the list of source URLs behind each case. You may copy it, publish it, build products on it and charge for them, as long as you attribute it.

Attribute it as The Machine Record, themachinerecord.com, with a link where a link is possible. If you cite a single case, its reference (for example TMR-0123) and its URL are stable and will not be reused for anything else.

What is not ours to license

The register is built on journalism done by others. The text of those articles belongs to the publishers who paid for it, and no licence we grant could cover it. That is why a case carries a headline and a sentence or two with attribution and an outbound link, rather than the article itself, and why source links are never placed behind our paywall. If you want the reporting, follow the link and read it where it was published.

Documents from regulators and courts sit under their own terms, which are usually more permissive again. Where a case rests on one, the case page links to it.

Machine access

The open case list at /api/public/cases needs no key and no account. It returns the same metadata this licence covers, 200 cases per page, and states the licence in every response. Use it rather than scraping the pages: it is faster for you and cheaper for us.

Filtered exports, the full source list per case with capture dates, and alerts are part of Pro. That is a convenience charge, not a licence charge: the same facts stay free to take from the open endpoint.

Corrections travel with the data

Cases change as evidence changes. If you have republished a case that was later corrected, withdrawn or marked disputed, the corrections log records what changed and when. Nothing is deleted quietly.