Terms of Service

These are the terms you agree to by using The Kissing Punk. Most of it is the ordinary business of running a website, written in the language we use everywhere else on the site rather than the language of a template.

Last updated: August 2026.

Who this applies to

It applies to anyone who loads a page here, from the reader who arrives once a year to the one who checks us every morning. Reading is the agreement, in the sense that if these terms are unacceptable, the remedy is to close the tab.

You need to be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and at least 13 in any case, to send us anything or to comment. If you are using the site for a company, you are telling us you can accept these terms on its behalf.

What we own, and what you may do with it

The reporting, the headlines, the photographs and illustrations we commission, the templates and the code belong to us or to the people who licensed them to us. Copyright in a piece sits with this publication or with the freelancer on the terms we agreed, and nothing enters the public domain because it was published free of charge.

What you get is a licence to read, and a generous one. Print an article, keep a copy, send a link to a colleague, quote a paragraph in an essay or a forum post with our name and a link on it. That is personal, non-commercial use. The licence does not cover taking the work and running it as your own product, which is the next section and our copyright policy.

Scraping, and models trained on our archive

This matters to us more than anything else on the page, so it gets written out properly. You may not run automated collection against this site beyond what our robots file permits: no bulk crawling of the archive, no headless browser working through the sitemap overnight, no proxy farm rotating addresses because the first attempt was rate-limited. We reserve every right the law gives a publisher over text and data mining of our content, and that reservation is machine-readable in our robots file as well as written here.

Using our journalism as training data for a machine learning model, a summariser or a retrieval index, without a written licence from us, is prohibited. We are not being sentimental about it. A reporter spent three days reading procurement records to establish one number, and the money that paid for those three days came from advertising served next to the article. A model that has swallowed the piece then answers the question the piece existed to answer, on somebody else’s page, with our costs and none of our revenue. We would rather license the archive than be quietly digested, and that conversation genuinely is available: write to support@thekissingpunk.com and ask.

Also out: republishing our articles in whole or in substantial part, translating them without permission, framing our pages so the work appears to be yours, stripping bylines, altering an article and leaving our name on it, and describing anything as our reporting when it is not. We take the last one particularly badly, having spent a lot of pages explaining what our name is supposed to mean.

What you send us, and what happens to it

Tips, documents, letters and comments are welcome, and this newsroom would be worse without the readers who write in. When you send us something you keep whatever rights you had in it, and you give us permission to publish it, quote it, edit it for length and clarity, and keep it in the archive. A document you mark confidential stays with the editor who opened the email.

Do not send us material that is not yours to send, and do not send us anything unlawful. Where comments are open, keep them to argument: no threats, no abuse of other readers, no defamation, no impersonation, no advertising. We moderate, we remove things, and we are not obliged to publish or keep any submission. What we will not do is edit a comment so somebody appears to have said something they did not, for the reasons in our corrections policy.

Links out, and material embedded in our pages

We link to sources constantly, because that is how a reader checks our work: the filing, the regulator’s register, the archived version of a page a company has since rewritten. A link is a citation. It is not an endorsement of the organisation at the other end, still less of everything else on their site.

Some pages carry embedded material from third parties, such as a video or an official post quoted in a story. We do not control it, its owner can change or delete it after we publish, and it loads under that party’s terms and privacy practices. Advertising works the same way, and what that means for tracking is in our cookie policy.

The site as it is

We check claims before publication rather than after a reader queries them, but nothing here comes with a warranty. The site and its contents are provided as they are and as they happen to be available. We do not guarantee that a link will still work in three years, or that an article written on Tuesday is the complete picture on Friday.

Our journalism is general information and not professional advice on money, law, health or anything else you might act on. That limit is set out on our disclaimer page, and it is a real limit rather than boilerplate.

Liability, and what you take on

So far as the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses arising from your use of the site: lost profits, lost data, a decision you took after reading something here. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid us to read the site, which is nothing.

Nothing here removes rights the law will not let us remove, including liability for fraud. If you break these terms and that causes a claim against us, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it.

Losing access

We can restrict or block access where these terms are being broken, and the usual case is not a person at all. It is a crawler taking the archive fast enough to degrade the site for readers, or a script trying to sign one address up to the email edition four hundred times.

For comments, serious or repeated breaches end in removal. Where the decision affects a real person rather than a bot, we will say why if you ask, and there is one inbox to ask in, listed on our contact page.

Which law applies

These terms are governed by the law of the place where this publication is established, and a dispute goes to the courts with jurisdiction there. If you are a consumer, that does not remove the protections of your own local law.

Before anybody involves a lawyer, write to us. Most complaints we get turn out to be about a fact, a headline or a correction, and those are settled in an email thread faster and cheaper than anywhere else.

Changes to these terms

We update this page when the site changes or the law does, and the date at the top moves when we do. Continuing to use the site after a change means the new version applies to you.

For anything material, particularly on reuse and automated collection, we will note what changed rather than swap the text and say nothing. Our reasoning about not editing published pages in silence is in our editorial standards, and it applies to our own policies too.