Terms of Use

These terms govern your use of standards.com and our newsletter. By using the site, you agree to them.

1. Who we are

standards.com is operated by Standards News, LLC, a Utah limited liability company. Standards News, LLC is the formation vehicle for standards: as the public benefit corporation is established, Standards News, LLC will be merged into it, these terms will bind the successor company, and this page will be updated to name it. Nothing about your rights changes in that transfer.

2. The service

standards is a newspaper of record, free to read. There is no charge, no account, and no registration required to read any news we publish. If you subscribe to the newsletter, that relationship is governed by these terms and by our Privacy Policy — double opt-in to join, one click to leave.

3. Our content, and what you may do with it

Everything we publish — stories, scores, methodology notes, the white paper, the design of the site — belongs to us or our licensors and is protected by copyright and other laws.

You may read it, link to it, share links to it, and quote from it in reasonable portions with attribution and, where practical, a link. That is what it is for.

What you may not do without a written license from us:

• Republish our content in bulk or as a substitute for visiting the site;
• Scrape, crawl, or harvest the site at scale, by any means, including automated agents;
• Use our content to train, fine-tune, or ground artificial-intelligence models or systems;
• Remove attribution, alter our content and present it as ours, or present altered content as ours;
• Sell our content or access to it.

Licensing — including licensing to AI platforms — is available on equal terms; write to contact@standards.com. (Licensees receive content the same way readers do: after publication, without advance notice or right of comment.) We may use technical measures — robots directives, rate limits, and access controls — to enforce these limits, and circumventing them is itself a violation of these terms.

4. Acceptable use

Do not interfere with the operation or security of the site; do not probe, overload, or disrupt it; do not impersonate standards or its journalists; do not use the site to violate the law.

5. What you send us

If you send us a message, a correction, a letter, or a tip, you confirm you have the right to share it. Contact and correction messages are an internal inbox and are never published (see the Privacy Policy). If we ever publish reader letters, we will say so clearly and ask before printing your name. We may act on what you send us — that is what it is for — but we owe you no payment or acknowledgment for unsolicited ideas.

(Nothing here limits or defines our treatment of confidential sources, which is governed by our editorial practices and the Charter, not by these terms.)

6. Third-party links

Stories link outward — that is showing our work. Linked sites are not ours, and their terms and privacy practices are their own.

7. Honest disclaimers

We work to make everything we publish accurate, and we correct errors in public. That is an editorial commitment, and we intend to be held to it — but it is not a legal warranty. The site and its content are provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied — including, without limitation, implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty of accuracy, completeness, or uninterrupted availability. Our journalism is general information, not legal, financial, medical, or professional advice for your specific situation.

8. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Standards News, LLC (and its successor), its officers, employees, and contributors are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages arising from your use of the site, and our total liability for any claim is limited to one hundred U.S. dollars ($100) or the amount you have paid us for the service in the twelve months before the claim arose, whichever is greater. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limitations; where the law says otherwise, the law wins.

9. Changes

We may update these terms as the publication grows. Material changes will be noted here with a revised date. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it. We will not change these terms to take rights in your reading habits — the Privacy Policy's commitments are not amendable by this page.

10. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and disputes belong to the state and federal courts located in Delaware. We do not require arbitration: you keep your right to court. Any dispute must be brought in your individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, consolidated, or representative proceeding. If a court finds that waiver unenforceable for a particular dispute, the waiver is severed for that dispute and the rest of these terms stand.

11. Contact

Questions about these terms: contact@standards.com. Copyright complaints: contact@standards.com, marked "Copyright," with the material identified and your contact information.

Where these terms and the law disagree, the law governs. And where these terms and the Editorial Charter's commitments to readers differ, whichever protects the reader more governs. Effective July 4, 2026.