Citation & Quotation Terms
The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/terms/citation · Effective October 16, 2026
In plain terms. Quote us. You do not need permission, you do not need to ask, and you never will. Take up to two hundred words from any single work of ours — more when your purpose fairly needs more — quote it accurately, and say it came from The Massachusetts Times. Facts are free, links are free, and criticism of us holds this grant as fully as praise does. What this page does not cover is wholesale reproduction, which the Licensing and Reprint Terms govern, and machine collection, which the Machine Terms govern exclusively. This summary is part of the terms and binds us like any article below, and where these terms could be read two ways about whether a quotation is permitted, the reading that permits it governs.
Article 1 — The Grant of Quotation
1.1. The Massachusetts Times Company grants everyone — any person, publication, scholar, critic, court, legislature, or rival — the right to quote the published record of The Massachusetts Times without asking, without paying, and without notice, for any purpose that deals in what we actually published.
1.2. Most publishers leave quotation to the gray mercy of copyright doctrine, so that every quoter carries a small legal risk. We remove the gray: within these terms, quotation of our work is not tolerated, it is granted.
1.3. The grant is standing. It does not expire, and it is not conditioned on who you are, what you believe, or what you say about us.
Article 2 — The Safe Harbor
2.1. A verbatim quotation of up to two hundred words from any single work of ours sits inside this grant without further analysis. Within the harbor, the only requirements are the attribution of Article 3 and the fidelity of Article 4.
2.2. Above two hundred words, the grant continues by proportion: quote what your purpose fairly requires, and no more than that. The measure is purpose, not arithmetic — a close textual critique may fairly need long passages; a repost needs none.
2.3. The harbor is per work, not per day or per quoter. Quoting two hundred words from each of ten works is ten quotations inside the harbor. Quoting a single work in serial installments is governed by Article 9, not by counting each installment against the harbor separately.
Article 3 — The One Condition: Attribution
3.1. Name us. A quotation under this grant attributes the work to The Massachusetts Times, and to its author wherever the work carries a byline.
3.2. Where your medium carries links, link the work. Where it does not — print, broadcast, speech — the name is enough.
3.3. No particular format is required. "— The Massachusetts Times" after the passage satisfies this article; so does any citation form that leaves a reader in no doubt about where the words came from.
3.4. Attribution is the whole price. We do not require approval of your use, registration of your identity, or a copy of your work.
Article 4 — Fidelity
4.1. A quotation presents our words as we published them. Omissions are marked with ellipses, insertions with brackets, and added emphasis is declared as added.
4.2. A quotation is not used to invert its own meaning. Passage and context travel together: a quotation arranged to assert that we said the opposite of what we said is not a quotation, it is a misattribution wearing quotation marks, and it sits outside this grant entirely.
4.3. Paraphrase is welcome and needs no grant at all — but paraphrase presented inside quotation marks as our verbatim words is a fidelity violation, not a quotation.
Article 5 — Facts, Titles, and Links
5.1. We report facts; we do not own them. Anyone may restate in their own words the facts our work establishes, without this grant, because no grant is needed. The facts are the public's. The words are ours, and the words are what Articles 1 through 4 lend you.
5.2. The titles of our works may be stated freely, in any medium, for any purpose.
5.3. A link is a citation, not a copy. Linking to any page at massachusettstimes.us requires no permission, no payment, and no notice, from anyone, ever, and we will never claim otherwise. A page's address and title are free to state anywhere.
5.4. What a machine collects and redisplays at scale is not a link. Automated collection, excerpting, and redisplay of our content remain governed exclusively by the Machine Terms at massachusettstimes.us/terms/machine, and nothing in this article narrows them.
Article 6 — Quoting What Others Said in Our Pages
6.1. When you quote words that someone else spoke or wrote and that we published, name both voices: the speaker as the source of the words, and The Massachusetts Times as the record they appear in — "as [name] told The Massachusetts Times."
6.2. The grant in these terms is ours to give only over our own expression. Works we publish under license from others are quoted under this grant only to the extent our own rights allow; where a work is marked as appearing under license, the mark controls.
Article 7 — Criticism Included
7.1. The grant does not flinch. You may quote us to dispute us, to embarrass us, to prove us wrong. Quotation rights here are viewpoint-neutral, and we do not revoke, narrow, or selectively enforce them by how the quoter treats us.
7.2. Copyright is not our rebuttal instrument. We answer speech with speech — with the record, with corrections where we erred, and with argument where we did not — never with a takedown aimed at a critic who quoted us accurately.
Article 8 — Commercial Settings
8.1. Quotation does not stop being quotation because money is near it. A book that is sold, a newsletter that charges, a broadcast that carries sponsorship — each may quote within this grant on the same terms as anyone else.
8.2. What a commercial setting may not do is the same thing no setting may do: pass beyond quotation into reproduction of the work itself. That line is drawn by Article 9 and crossed only through the Licensing and Reprint Terms.
Article 9 — Where Quotation Ends
9.1. Quotation ends at substitution: when what you carry is enough that reading you replaces reading us, you are no longer quoting the work, you are serving it, and the Licensing and Reprint Terms govern.
9.2. Quotation ends at reassembly: serial excerpts that, taken together, reconstruct a work or the substance of it are a reproduction in installments, whatever each installment's length.
9.3. Quotation ends at passing off: our words presented as your own are outside every grant we make. Attribution is not merely the condition of this grant; its absence in a verbatim copy is the oldest violation in publishing.
9.4. This page grants quotation of text. Photographs, illustrations, graphics, and page designs are excerpted and reused only under the Licensing and Reprint Terms.
9.5. Beyond each of these ends stands the License Desk, which exists to say yes quickly. Crossing the line is not a dead end; it is the start of the licensing conversation.
Article 10 — Machines
10.1. Machine reading, collection, training, embedding, and retrieval are not quotation, at any length, with any attribution, and nothing in these terms licenses them. They are governed exclusively by the Machine Terms at massachusettstimes.us/terms/machine.
10.2. A human quoting under this grant may of course use tools to write, publish, and format. The line of Article 9 of the Access Terms holds here: scale and purpose, not the presence of a tool, decide which lane an act is in.
Article 11 — Comfort Beyond the Grant
11.1. If your counsel, publisher, or institution wants written comfort beyond this standing grant, the License Desk will issue it. The desk is reached through massachusettstimes.us/licensing, and a confirmation of quotation rights within these terms is issued without charge.
Article 12 — Misquotation and Cure
12.1. If a quotation of our work breaks Article 4 — altered words, inverted meaning, missing attribution — we will tell you plainly, in writing, what is wrong and what fixes it, and allow thirty days to cure, as the notice-and-cure article of the Terms of Use provides.
12.2. A cured misquotation is closed. We do not keep ledgers of corrected mistakes, and an honest error, fixed, costs the quoter nothing and leaves the grant intact.
12.3. Deliberate misattribution maintained after notice and cure is addressed under the Dispute Terms — in the open, in court, never by arbitration ambush, like every dispute we have.
Article 13 — How to Cite Us
13.1. The canonical citation of a work of ours carries five elements: The Massachusetts Times; the work's title; its byline, where one is named; its publication date; and its address at massachusettstimes.us.
13.2. Any citation format that carries those elements — Chicago, APA, MLA, Bluebook, or a plain sentence — is correct. The elements are what matter, not the punctuation around them.
13.3. We keep our addresses so that a citation made today resolves tomorrow. The Archive and Permanence Terms carry our commitments to the stability of the record; this article is the reason a careful scholar can cite us without fear of rot.
Article 14 — Changes to These Terms
14.1. 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 quotation is never consent.
14.2. No change reaches backward. A quotation lawful under these terms when made remains lawful, forever, whatever these terms later say.
Article 15 — The Spine These Terms Share
15.1. These Citation and Quotation 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.
15.2. Where these terms could be read two ways about whether a quotation is permitted, the reading that permits it governs. The reader's canon reads ambiguity against us; this article is that canon applied to the quoter.
Article 16 — The Record of These Terms
16.1. The current text of these Citation and Quotation Terms lives at massachusettstimes.us/terms/citation, with its effective date at the head. Prior versions and their dates are kept and published alongside it, so what we granted on any given day can always be checked.
These terms are part of the Terms that govern this publication.