{
  "name": "The Stochastic Parrot: rights and license posture",
  "url": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/license/",
  "as_of": "2026-09-01",
  "statement_type": "good-faith statement of practice; not legal advice",
  "publisher": {
    "site": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/",
    "entity": null,
    "note": "No company, no legal department, no registered agent. One operator, named on /masthead/.",
    "contact_email": "portneymk@gmail.com",
    "operator_authority": "retraction and snapshot removal, by hand"
  },
  "layers": [
    {
      "id": "desk_own",
      "what": "The desk's own analysis, prose, exhibits, computed fields, page structure and datasets.",
      "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
      "license_short": "CC BY 4.0",
      "attribution": "The Stochastic Parrot, https://thestochasticparrot.com/",
      "permitted": [
        "crawl",
        "index",
        "redistribute",
        "train",
        "commercial reuse"
      ],
      "scope_note": "The license attaches to the desk-generated fields inside a payload, never to a payload as a whole.",
      "code": "The pipeline source is unpublished and outside this grant."
    },
    {
      "id": "quoted_spans",
      "what": "Verbatim third-party text and headlines carried inside desk payloads, including spans[].quote and sources[] rows.",
      "license": null,
      "license_note": "Not the desk's to license. Copyright rests with the newsroom credited beside each span. Presence inside a CC BY 4.0 payload is not a grant from that outlet.",
      "affected_payloads": [
        "/audits/<slug>.json",
        "/audits/<slug>.md",
        "/framing-index.json",
        "/flags.json",
        "/angles.json",
        "/lexicon.json"
      ],
      "correction": "Until 2026-09-01 a single top-level \"license\": \"CC BY 4.0\" was emitted over payloads carrying both desk fields and third-party spans. That scoping was too wide as published and is being narrowed in the payload schema and on /connect/.",
      "permitted": [
        "read",
        "check against the cited source",
        "quote with attribution to the newsroom"
      ],
      "not_granted": [
        "redistribution",
        "training corpus rights",
        "sublicensing"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "frozen_source_bodies",
      "what": "Extracts of cited source pages under /snapshots/, retained so a quoted span stays checkable at its recorded offset.",
      "license": null,
      "purpose": "verification only",
      "disclaimed": [
        "republication",
        "substitute for the original",
        "training corpus"
      ],
      "crawl": "disallowed",
      "robots_txt": "Disallow: /snapshots/ in every user-agent group",
      "http_header": "X-Robots-Tag: noindex, noarchive",
      "meta_robots": "noindex, follow",
      "header_limit_note": "noindex governs search listings only. It is invisible to a fetcher that never renders and does not constrain ingestion. The Disallow is the line addressed to ingestion.",
      "retained_content": "the quoted spans plus roughly 300 characters of context either side, with offsets recorded against the retained text",
      "history": "Before 2026-09-01 these paths served the full retrieved body. Operators who took full bodies from them are asked not to retain, index or train on that material.",
      "counts": {
        "run_directories": 588,
        "source_records": 5737,
        "distinct_source_hosts": 807,
        "unit": "files under site/snapshots/",
        "as_of": "2026-09-02"
      },
      "products_not_offered": [
        "public full-text index over snapshot bodies",
        "browsable snapshot archive"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "rights_holder_actions": [
    {
      "id": "right_of_reply",
      "url": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/reply/",
      "terms": "Standing. Write from a masthead address with the piece URL. The reply publishes verbatim on the piece, above the desk's text, attributed and dated, unedited and not rebutted in the same breath.",
      "conditions": "none on the merits; a masthead address is the channel"
    },
    {
      "id": "correction",
      "url": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/corrections/",
      "data": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/corrections.json",
      "terms": "Append-only ledger. A verified error gets a ledger entry and a fix. Entries are added, never removed.",
      "entries": 35,
      "entries_as_of": "2026-08-15"
    },
    {
      "id": "snapshot_removal",
      "terms": "A frozen source body can be removed, or trimmed further, at the request of the newsroom that wrote it. Performed by the operator, by hand. It is the only removal this desk performs.",
      "not_available": "removal of a published piece or of a quoted span from the record; retractions are logged as retractions",
      "turnaround": null,
      "turnaround_note": "No response time is stated because none can be kept automatically. One person reads the mailbox."
    }
  ],
  "acquisition": {
    "paywalls": "The desk does not work around a paywall. Where an outlet sells access, buying it is the only route the desk will use.",
    "paid_crawl_rail": "built, not running"
  },
  "not_determined_here": [
    "whether any quotation on this site is fair use or fair dealing",
    "any question of law; this document states practice, not a legal conclusion"
  ],
  "doctrine": {
    "scope": "The desk audits coverage and words, not the world.",
    "scoring": "The desk does not score outlets. Counts on /outlets/ are exposure, not error.",
    "figures": "Different surfaces publish different units for the same masthead. Any cited figure carries its unit, its source file and its as-of date."
  },
  "related": {
    "page": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/license/",
    "robots": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/robots.txt",
    "index": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/llms.txt",
    "data": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/data/",
    "mcp_and_api": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/connect/",
    "method": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/method",
    "masthead": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/masthead/",
    "ai_plugin": "https://thestochasticparrot.com/.well-known/ai-plugin.json"
  },
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}