DMCA & Copyright Policy
This page covers copyright in both directions: what we own and how you may use it, and how to tell us if something here infringes your work. Last updated: August 2026.
We are a small newsroom that pays for original reporting, so we take both halves seriously. We read takedown notices closely too, because on this beat a few are not really about copyright.
What we own, and what needs permission
The reporting, headlines, photographs, video, graphics, maps and newsletters produced for Somali Update are our copyright, or that of contributors who license their work to us. Material from other rights holders is used under licence, with attribution, or as fair use for reporting and comment.
Using our work beyond the personal reading licence in our terms of service needs written permission. That includes republication, translation, redistribution at scale to a mailing list or messaging group, use in a commercial product, and use as training, retrieval or grounding material for a machine learning system. We reserve text and data mining rights so far as the law allows.
Quoting us, and republishing us
Quote a paragraph, take the fact you need with our name on it, and link back. That is how the web is meant to work and we do it to other publishers every day. Aggregators and newsrooms may build on our reporting as long as it is clear whose it was.
What we act on is the other thing. A whole article copied onto another site. A piece translated and reposted with no credit. Our text pasted into a forwarded message with our name stripped out or, worse, with our name attached to a figure we never published. That last case is why we chase attribution hard, as our about page explains.
Reprints, syndication and licensing
Write to support@somaliupdate.com with COPYRIGHT at the start of the subject line. Tell us which piece, where it would appear, for how long, and whether the use is commercial. Requests from Somali-language outlets, community radio and small diaspora publications wanting to translate a story are usually granted free, on condition of a credit and a link.
Commercial republication and bulk licensing carry a fee, and we answer within a few working days. Photographs and video often sit under a third-party licence we cannot pass on, and there we point you to the rights holder.
Sending us a takedown notice
If you own copyright in material appearing here without your permission, you can send us a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. ยง512. Every element below has to be in it, because a notice missing one slows things down.
- Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed, or a representative list if the notice covers several.
- Identification of the infringing material, precise enough to find: the URL of the page and which element on it, not the name of the site.
- Your name, postal address, telephone number and email address, so we and whoever posted the material can contact you.
- 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 is accurate and that, under penalty of perjury, you own the exclusive right involved or are authorised to act for the owner.
- Your physical or electronic signature.
Send it to support@somaliupdate.com with DMCA NOTICE at the start of the subject line. That is our designated agent’s inbox; the agent is our managing editor, accountable for everything the site publishes. We print no name here because we print no staff names anywhere, for the contributor safety reasons on our contact page. A lawyer who needs a postal route for service should ask.
What happens once we have it
We acknowledge a valid notice within two working days and act promptly, which normally means disabling access while we look at it. Where a user posted the material, we forward the notice with the contact details the statute requires and tell them how to counter-notify.
Where the material is our own reporting we look at whether the use was licensed, attributed, or fair use, and tell you which conclusion we reached. Sometimes the answer is that we got it wrong. Then it comes down, and if the piece stays up in edited form we note the change in line with our corrections policy.
Counter-notification
If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you can send a counter-notice. It needs your signature, identification of the removed material and where it appeared, your name, address and telephone number, a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the removal resulted from mistake or misidentification, and your consent to the jurisdiction of a federal court in your district or, if you are outside the United States, any district where we may be found, together with your agreement to accept service from the person who complained.
We pass a valid counter-notice to the original complainant. If they do not tell us within ten business days that they have gone to court to restrain the activity, we may restore the material, normally between ten and fourteen business days after we forwarded it.
Repeat infringers, and notices that are not about copyright
Comment accounts used to post infringing material are warned, then suspended, then closed. We keep a record of notices received so a pattern is visible, and we terminate repeat infringers.
The other direction needs saying. Section 512(f) makes anyone who knowingly misrepresents that material is infringing liable for damages, including our legal costs, and we read notices with that in mind. Reporting on this region attracts takedown attempts from people whose real complaint is the story: a screenshot of an official document they would rather nobody saw, or a photograph claimed after months in circulation. If a notice is formally valid we act on it. We also say on the page that material was removed on a copyright claim, note who made it, and go on reporting the underlying facts in our own words.
