DMCA & Copyright Policy

What belongs to us

The reporting, headlines, photographs, graphics, compiled data and page design here are ours, or are used under licence from the photographer or agency they belong to. Copyright is asserted in all of it. Free to read is not free to take, and this page exists because that gets tested regularly.

Reuse beyond ordinary reading needs permission: reposting an article in full or in substantial part, translating one, putting our photograph on your page, rebuilding our rainfall or results tables as your own, or running our copy inside an app. The rules for using the site, including why bulk scraping and machine-learning training are refused outright, are in our terms of service.

Quoting us, linking to us, republishing us

Quotation is welcome and we would rather encourage it than police it. Take a couple of sentences, name KeralaNews 24×7, and link to the story you took them from. If our reporting broke something and you are following it up, say so and link us high rather than at the bottom. That is the practice we follow when we build on a Malayalam newsroom’s work.

The full lift is another matter: our story rewritten lightly and posted without credit, our headline and photograph pulled into an aggregator with a link nobody can find, our copy translated and published as somebody’s own file. This site exists because of the detail that gets shaved off when Kerala copy moves between desks, an argument our about page makes at length, and a scraped rewrite is where those details die.

For a reprint, translation or syndication licence, write to support@keralanews247.com with COPYRIGHT at the front of the subject line and say which piece, where it would appear, whether the use is commercial, and for how long. Educational and non-commercial requests are usually approved quickly and often free. Sometimes an image is licensed to us and not ours to sublicense, and then we say who to ask.

If you believe we have infringed your copyright

Tell us and we will look properly. We are not a United States publisher, but our hosting and distribution touch United States services, and the procedure under 17 U.S.C. section 512 is the clearest one available to both sides, so we follow it. Before filing, consider whether the use was a short attributed quotation or reporting on the work itself, since those may be permitted. A valid takedown notice must include all of the following:

Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed, or a representative list where several works on one page are involved.
Identification of the material you say infringes it, with enough information for us to find it. In practice: the exact URL and where on the page it sits, such as the third photograph.
Your contact details, meaning name, postal address, telephone number and email address.
A statement that you have a good faith belief the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
A statement that the information in your notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the copyright owner or are authorised to act for the owner.
Your physical or electronic signature.

A notice missing any of those cannot be acted on as a formal notice, and we will write back naming what is absent rather than ignoring you. If the real complaint is that our reporting about you is wrong rather than that we copied your work, our corrections policy is the right instrument.

Where notices go, and what happens next

Our designated copyright agent is our managing editor, reachable at support@keralanews247.com with COPYRIGHT in the subject line. We publish roles rather than personal names across this site. If your lawyer needs a postal route for service, ask and we will give you one.

Notices are acknowledged within two working days and valid ones acted on expeditiously. If a claim is clearly right, the material comes down while we sort it out, because leaving a photograph up through a long conversation is not defensible. If it looks wrong, we say why and invite you to answer. Where a reader posted the material we tell them and pass on your notice. Removing a photograph is not deleting the story around it: the URL stays live with a note saying what changed.

Counter-notification

If material you posted here was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, send a counter-notification. It needs your signature, identification of what was removed and where it appeared before removal, a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief it came down in error, your name, postal address and telephone number, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the district of your address, or, if you are outside the United States, of any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, with your agreement to accept service of process from whoever filed the original notice.

We pass a valid counter-notification to the complainant. Unless they tell us they have filed a court action to restrain the activity, the material goes back up in not less than ten and not more than fourteen business days from receipt, and we tell you when it is restored.

Repeat infringers, and false claims

Comment accounts and contributors who repeatedly post infringing material lose access. We keep a record of notices so a pattern is visible rather than forgotten, and a second or third instance ends the account. A freelancer who files somebody else’s photograph as their own does not file here again, exactly as our editorial standards treat fabrication.

Notices cut both ways. Under section 512(f), knowingly misrepresenting that material is infringing makes you liable for damages and costs, ours included. Copyright gets used as a quick route to bury a story, we read notices with that in mind, and we say publicly when a takedown attempt was really a complaint about coverage.

Send the six elements above in one email and we start on it the day it lands.