Machine Terms

The United States Times · Published by The United States Times Company · theunitedstatestimes.com/terms/machine · Effective October 16, 2026

In plain terms. This is the one page of ours addressed to machines — more precisely, to the people and companies who operate them. Everything else we publish grants things to human beings; this page is the whole of what automated systems may do with our record, and nothing anywhere else licenses a machine. Four lanes are free: indexing that sends readers to us, preservation by public memory institutions, bona fide scholarship, and reading our signals themselves. Everything else — training, bulk collection, redisplay, datasets — is licensed in writing through our License Desk at posted or negotiated rates, or it is refused. A machine that wears a human's face to pass our walls, or an assistive reader's face, has already told us everything we need to know about its operator. And no system, licensed or not, may attribute to The United States Times words we never published. This summary is part of the terms and binds like any article below.

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Article 1 — The Lane and Its Walls

1.1. Every grant The United States Times Company makes elsewhere — the Access Terms, the Citation and Quotation Terms, the Education Terms, all of them — is made to people. This page is the exclusive lane for automated access to the record of The United States Times, and the whole of it.

1.2. No other page of ours licenses a machine, at any length, with any attribution, for any purpose. Where another page of ours and this one could be read to overlap, this one governs machines, alone.

1.3. Nothing on this page is a courtesy. It is the standing offer, the rate architecture, and the boundary, and we enforce all three.

Article 2 — Who This Page Addresses, and How It Binds

2.1. These terms address operators: every person or entity that directs, deploys, or benefits from automated access to theunitedstatestimes.com — crawler owners, model builders, dataset assemblers, platform operators, and those who hire them.

2.2. An operator whose systems access the record after these terms are published has accepted them. Access is acceptance here, and only here.

2.3. We owe readers an explanation of that asymmetry, and it is this: we promise human beings that reading is never consent, because a person owes us nothing for the record. A machine is not a reader; it is an instrument of its operator's business, aimed at our record deliberately and on notice. The reader's canon shelters people. Operators deal with us at arm's length, under these terms read plainly.

Article 3 — What Is a Machine Here

3.1. Automated access means access whose scale, pattern, or purpose exceeds human reading: crawling, scraping, bulk retrieval, systematic collection, ingestion into datasets or models, and machine redisplay of the record.

3.2. A person's tools are the person's, and are never machines under this page: browsers, reading modes, assistive technology, personal archiving, and the ordinary instruments of reading at human pace. The line — drawn in the Access Terms and held everywhere — is scale and purpose, never the mere presence of a tool.

3.3. Doubt about which side of the line an access sits on is resolved by what it does: collection no person reads, or collection for redistribution, is automated access.

Article 4 — The Human Firewall

4.1. Nothing on this page narrows any human grant anywhere in our terms. No measure taken against machines may cost a reader the record.

4.2. Our defenses never knowingly target assistive technology, as the Accessibility Terms provide, and a defense that catches a disabled reader's instrument by error is a defect we repair, not a policy we defend.

4.3. An operator's violation is answered against the operator — by wall, by rate, by court — never by degrading the free lane that readers hold.

Article 5 — The Free Lanes

5.1. Discovery. Indexing the record to point readers to it is licensed here, free: collection whose product is a result that names us, links to us at theunitedstatestimes.com, and sends the reader to our pages rather than replacing them.

5.2. Preservation. Public memory institutions — libraries, archives, and preservation projects serving the public record — may collect and preserve the record, free, as the Archive and Permanence Terms promised. Their copies serve memory, not markets.

5.3. Scholarship. Bona fide research — computational analysis of the record for study whose product is scholarship rather than a competing service or dataset for sale — is licensed here, free, as the Education Terms promised.

5.4. Signals. Reading this page, our robots declarations, and our machine-readable notices is free to any system, since terms no machine may read would be a trap, and we do not build traps.

5.5. Every free lane carries the same four conditions: identify truthfully under Article 10; honor our signals and rate limits; take no more than the lane's purpose requires; and resell nothing — a free lane's collection is not inventory. A free lane used outside its purpose is unlicensed access.

Article 6 — The Licensed Lanes

6.1. All other automated access is licensed in writing or it is unlicensed. The licensed lanes include, without limitation: ingestion for the training, tuning, or grounding of machine-learning systems; bulk or systematic collection of the record; machine redisplay, summarization at scale, and answer services built on our content; dataset assembly and syndication; and commercial text and data mining.

6.2. Licenses issue from the License Desk at theunitedstatestimes.com/licensing, under the instrument rules of the Licensing and Reprint Terms: nothing is implied, nothing is exclusive unless written, nothing passes by silence, and the instrument states exactly what it grants.

6.3. Where a schedule of machine-access rates is posted at this page's address, it is our standing offer for the lanes it prices, and access on those lanes at those rates under these terms is licensed accordingly. Where no rate is posted for a use, the use requires the Desk's written instrument before it begins.

6.4. A license never includes what Article 9 forbids, and no price buys it.

Article 7 — Substitution

7.1. The free discovery lane ends where substitution begins, on the same test the Citation and Quotation Terms apply to people: when what a system serves is enough that its users never need our pages, the system is not pointing at the record — it is serving it, at scale, as its own product.

7.2. Substitution — answer engines, summary surfaces, and redisplay products built on our content — is a licensed lane. We built the record; a system built on the record pays for the record.

7.3. A link with a title is always free, as we promised everyone in the Citation and Quotation Terms. Substitution is not a link, and calling it one does not make it one.

Article 8 — Training and Machine Learning

8.1. Ingestion of the record for the training, tuning, retrieval grounding, or evaluation of machine-learning systems is a licensed act. It is never implied, never bundled silently into another lane, and never free by default — including for systems whose outputs are offered free.

8.2. A training license carries three standing duties beyond its stated scope: provenance — licensed copies of the record carry their source and collection date; currency — the licensee honors our corrections and withdrawal notices in each subsequent build or refresh of what was trained or assembled, as the Correction Terms' principle requires, though no license obligates surgery on what is already built; and attribution integrity under Article 9.

8.3. An operator who trained on the record without license owes, at minimum, what the license would have cost, and the absence of a posted price is not a discount — it is the absence of permission.

Article 9 — The Misattribution Rule

9.1. No system, licensed or unlicensed, free lane or paid, may attribute to The United States Times what The United States Times did not publish. A fabricated quotation, a invented citation, a synthetic "article" wearing our name — each is a false record issued against our masthead, and these terms are violated the moment one is served.

9.2. The duty is the machine-lane form of the oldest rule in our pages: the record is what we published, exactly, with its corrections and its dates. The Citation and Quotation Terms call accurate quotation a grant and inversion a misattribution; this article applies that law to systems.

9.3. An operator notified of misattribution by its system cures it — correction of the output path and of what produces it — under the notice-and-cure machinery of the Terms of Use, and a cure here is measured by the fabrication stopping.

Article 10 — Conduct at the Walls

10.1. Automated access identifies itself truthfully: an accurate agent identity, a reachable operator, and no rotation or disguise deployed to defeat attribution of the access to its operator.

10.2. No machine wears a human's face. Impersonating a reader to pass walls built for machines is a violation in itself; impersonating assistive technology is the same violation twice, and we treat it with exactly the contempt it has earned.

10.3. No laundering. A license an operator could not get directly does not exist through an intermediary, a contractor, a "research" front, or a dataset bought secondhand — collection's character travels with the collection, and a buyer of unlicensed collection stands where the collector stood.

10.4. The lane is shared with readers. Automated access respects our rate limits and never degrades the service that carries the free record — load that impairs readers is the conduct the Access Terms call harm to the host, whoever's machine produces it.

10.5. Our machine-readable signals — robots declarations and their successors — are part of these terms. Where a signal and this page differ, the narrower permission governs, and the absence of a signal is the absence of permission, not an invitation.

Article 11 — Remedies

11.1. We defend the record in the order that costs readers nothing: walls against the violating system, termination of its lanes and licenses, and then the open courts under the Dispute Terms — Massachusetts law, public courtrooms, no arbitration ambush in either direction.

11.2. Unlicensed collection is owed at least its license price, as Article 8.3 states for training and as holds for every priced lane; what exceeds the price — the substitution, the misattribution, the damage to the record's integrity — is owed on top, as the law provides.

11.3. Nothing here waives any right the law gives us against unlicensed use, and nothing here is our election between remedies.

Article 12 — The Desk

12.1. One door serves every machine question: the License Desk at theunitedstatestimes.com/licensing. Licenses, rate confirmations, free-lane confirmations in writing, and bespoke instruments for uses these pages did not anticipate all issue there.

12.2. The Desk answers. An operator who asks before collecting is our counterparty; an operator who collects before asking is our defendant, and the difference in how those two conversations go is entirely of the operator's choosing.

Article 13 — Changes to These Terms

13.1. Changes to this page are published dated, at this address, and a narrowing of a free lane or a material adverse change to licensed parties takes effect no earlier than thirty days after its dated notice.

13.2. A written license keeps its terms for its stated life, whatever this page later says. What was lawfully collected under a lane while the lane stood remains lawfully collected; the duties that travel with it — provenance, currency, attribution integrity — travel on.

13.3. If The United States Times Company's business changes hands or form, these terms, their licenses, and their receivables travel whole to the successor under the assignment article of the Terms of Use.

Article 14 — The Spine These Terms Share

14.1. These Machine Terms incorporate the general articles of the Terms of Use — one-way severance, assignment to successors, the record of versions — and the governing law and open courts carried by the Dispute Terms.

14.2. The reader's canon does not tilt this page: it shelters readers, and operators are not readers. These terms are read plainly, at arm's length — though our own duties of honesty in them bind us fully, because we do not keep two characters.

14.3. Where these terms and any other page we publish could be read to conflict about a machine's permissions, the narrower permission governs.

Article 15 — The Record of These Terms

15.1. The current text of these Machine Terms lives at theunitedstatestimes.com/terms/machine, with its effective date at the head. Prior versions and their dates are kept and published alongside it, so what any operator was on notice of, on any given day, can always be checked.