Access Terms
The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/terms/access · Effective October 16, 2026
In plain terms. Reading The Massachusetts Times is free — not free as a promotion, free as a term. This document grants every person the right to read everything we publish at massachusettstimes.us without paying, registering, signing in, or identifying themselves, and it holds us to that grant. There is no meter, no article allowance, and no second, fuller edition behind a wall. Payment to us buys support and extras; it never buys the news, because the news is not sold by the copy. This summary is part of the terms and binds us like any article below. Where the long text and this summary could be read to disagree, both are read in your favor.
Article 1 — The Grant
1.1. The Massachusetts Times Company grants every natural person the right to read the published record of The Massachusetts Times at massachusettstimes.us: every article, page, edition, and archived item we serve to the public.
1.2. The grant is unconditional on payment and unconditional on identity. No price, account, registration, sign-in, email address, telephone number, or proof of who you are is ever a condition of reading.
1.3. The grant is made to you directly. It is a term of these pages, not a courtesy, and you may hold us to it under the Dispute Terms like any other term.
Article 2 — What Free Means
2.1. Free means no money: no charge, no fee, and no gate that must be passed with a payment of any size.
2.2. Free means no account: reading never requires creating, holding, or signing into anything.
2.3. Free means no identity: reading never requires telling us, or anyone through us, who you are. Our Data Terms make the same promise from the other side — the reading lane is built so that it does not collect what it does not need.
2.4. Free means no data as payment. We do not treat your information as the price of the page. A page that cannot be read without surrendering identity is not free, and we do not publish such pages.
Article 3 — No Meter
3.1. There is no article count, monthly allowance, preview limit, or "you have read N of M free articles" device anywhere on massachusettstimes.us.
3.2. Each published work is served whole. We do not truncate, fade out, or abridge the record for readers who have not paid, because there is no class of readers who have paid for the record.
3.3. We do not publish the record in two editions — a full one for payers and a lesser one for the public. There is one record, and this grant covers all of it.
Article 4 — Breadth of the Grant
4.1. The grant covers the published record at massachusettstimes.us: current pages, standing pages, and the archive as served to the public. The archive carries its own commitments in the Archive and Permanence Terms; this grant is your right to read it without charge.
4.2. The grant covers the whole of each work as published, including corrections and the dated record of changes where one is kept.
4.3. The grant does not depend on how you arrive — from the front page, a search engine, a link in a message, or a typed address. A reader from anywhere is a reader.
Article 5 — Who Holds the Grant
5.1. Every natural person holds this grant. It does not depend on where you live, what you believe, whether you subscribe, or whether you have ever paid us anything.
5.2. We do not divide readers by territory. We do not sell access by geography and we do not maintain regional walls. If a law binding on us ever compels a restriction, Article 12 governs how we carry it and how we say so.
Article 6 — What Payment Buys, and What It Never Buys
6.1. Where a publication offers paid membership or subscription, the Subscription Terms govern it. Payment buys standing, support, and the extras named at the point of sale.
6.2. Payment never buys the news. We do not sell early access to the record, fuller versions of the record, or relief from a meter, because none of those exist. The reader who pays nothing reads the same record, at the same time, as the member who pays.
6.3. Payment never buys influence over the record, as the Subscription Terms state. This article is the same wall seen from the free side.
Article 7 — The Only Obligations Reading Creates
7.1. Reading creates no obligations beyond the Terms of Use, read under the reader's canon that governs all our terms: ambiguity is read against us, never against you.
7.2. We do not deem reading to be consent to anything these pages do not say. No obligation of yours is created by scrolling, continuing, or returning.
7.3. Nothing in this grant takes anything from you. It is a one-way grant from publisher to reader; your only duties around it are the narrow ones in Article 9.
Article 8 — The Lane Itself
8.1. The record is served on the open web at massachusettstimes.us, as pages readable in a standard browser. No application, device brand, or platform account is required to read.
8.2. Access without payment includes access without needless barriers. The Accessibility Terms carry our commitments to readers who use assistive technology; this grant is theirs on equal footing.
8.3. We serve the reading lane as well as we are able. This grant is a promise of the lane's freedom, not a warranty of its uptime; when the lane fails, our obligation is to restore it, and the Terms of Service govern how we run the systems that carry it.
Article 9 — Reading at Human Scale
9.1. This grant is made to people reading. Automated access — crawling, scraping, bulk collection, and machine reading of any kind — is not covered here and is governed exclusively by the Machine Terms at massachusettstimes.us/terms/machine.
9.2. Using tools to read is not a violation. Readers use browsers, reading modes, assistive technology, and personal copies for their own use; all of that is reading. The line is scale and purpose: collection at a scale no person reads, or collection for redistribution, belongs to the Machine Terms or the Licensing and Reprint Terms, not to this grant.
9.3. The grant is not a license to harm the host. Deliberate interference with the service — attacks, floods, probes for weakness — is outside the grant entirely and is addressed under the Terms of Service.
Article 10 — Barring a Reader
10.1. A public record argues against barring any person from reading it. We do not operate punishment walls, shadow limits, or quiet throttles aimed at individual readers.
10.2. The narrow exception is defense of the service: where specific conduct threatens the host or other readers — the conduct named in Article 9.3 — we may block the technical source of that conduct for as long as the threat lasts, and no longer.
10.3. A block under this article is a defensive act, not a judgment on a person's right to the record. It is never used to answer criticism, complaints, or disputes; a reader in a dispute with us keeps this grant in full, as the Dispute Terms require.
Article 11 — A Wall Is a Defect
11.1. If anything on massachusettstimes.us ever demands payment, registration, sign-in, or identity as a condition of reading the record, it is a malfunction or a mistake, not a term — no matter what the erroneous surface says.
11.2. Report it through the publication's published contact channels and we will remove it. Under the reader's canon, the erroneous surface binds us in your favor; it never binds you.
11.3. This article is the access counterpart of the pricing-error article in the Terms of Sale: our errors are ours to bear, in the open.
Article 12 — Compelled Restrictions
12.1. If a law or order binding on us ever compels a restriction of this grant, we will restrict no more than the compulsion requires, state the restriction plainly on the affected surface, and keep a dated record of what was restricted and under what authority, to the full extent the law allows us to speak.
12.2. The resistance posture of the Data Terms applies here with equal force: demands are tested, not obeyed by reflex.
Article 13 — Changes to This Grant
13.1. Any narrowing of this grant is a material adverse change and takes effect no earlier than thirty days after we publish a dated notice, as the Terms of Use require. Silence is not notice, and continued reading is never consent.
13.2. No change reaches backward. What was published into the free lane stays readable under the Archive and Permanence Terms.
13.3. If The Massachusetts Times Company's business changes hands or form, this grant travels with the record to the successor under the assignment article of the Terms of Use, on these same terms.
Article 14 — The Spine These Terms Share
14.1. These Access Terms incorporate the Open Covenant and the general articles of the Terms of Use: the reader's canon, one-way severance, assignment to successors, the record of versions, and the governing law and open courts carried by the Dispute Terms.
14.2. Where these Access Terms and any other page we publish could be read to conflict about a reader's free access, the reading most favorable to free access governs.
Article 15 — The Record of These Terms
15.1. The current text of these Access Terms lives at massachusettstimes.us/terms/access, with its effective date at the head. Prior versions and their dates are kept and published alongside it, so what we promised on any given day can always be checked.
These terms are part of the Terms that govern this publication.