Copyright and DMCA Policy

Effective date: August 13, 2026.

1. Scope and Definitions

This Copyright and DMCA Policy governs the ownership, licensing, and protection of content published on Colbertism, an independent economics and markets publication, and sets out the procedure for reporting alleged copyright infringement. In this policy, “Content” means every original work published on this site, including essays and articles, headlines, charts, tables, figures, data visualizations, photographs, illustrations, and the selection and arrangement of material on each page. “We,” “us,” and “our” refer to the operator of Colbertism. This policy should be read together with our Terms of Use, which incorporate it by reference.

2. Ownership of Original Content

All original Content on Colbertism is protected by copyright from the moment of its creation and is owned by the operator of Colbertism unless a specific item is expressly credited to another rights holder. Copyright subsists automatically under the Berne Convention and under Indonesian Law Number 28 of 2014 on Copyright; no registration or copyright notice is required for protection to apply. Ownership covers not only the text of our essays but also the underlying editorial work embodied in our charts, tables, and figures: the selection of data series, the analytical framing, the annotations, and the visual design. Where a chart presents publicly available statistics, the raw numbers themselves are not claimed as our property, but our particular expression, arrangement, and presentation of them are.

3. License Granted to Readers

By publishing Content on the open web, we grant every visitor a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to access and read the Content for personal, non-commercial purposes. Within that license, you may do the following freely and without asking us first:

  • Quote briefly. You may reproduce short excerpts (as a guideline, up to 150 words of text or one chart) in your own commentary, criticism, reporting, or research, provided you credit Colbertism and link to the original page. The excerpt must not substitute for reading the original.
  • Share links. You may link to any page on this site from any platform, newsletter, or document, with or without a brief description. Linking never requires permission.
  • Teach with credit. Instructors may display or project our essays, charts, and figures in a live classroom or lecture setting, and may include short excerpts in course slides, provided the source is credited as described in Section 6.
  • Save personal copies. You may print or save individual pages for your own private reference.

4. Uses Requiring Written Permission

Every use not listed in Section 3 requires our prior written permission. Without limitation, the following always require permission:

  • Republication of any essay, chart, table, or figure in full or in substantial part, on any website, in print, or in any other medium;
  • Translation of any Content into another language, whether or not the translation is published commercially;
  • Commercial reuse of any kind, including incorporation of our Content into paid products, client reports, marketing material, or subscription services;
  • Systematic scraping, crawling, mirroring, or bulk downloading of the site beyond what standard search-engine indexing performs;
  • Ingestion of our Content into datasets, corpora, or training pipelines for machine-learning or artificial-intelligence systems, including for model training, fine-tuning, embedding generation, or retrieval systems, whether the resulting system is commercial or not.

Absence of technical barriers does not imply consent. The fact that a page can be fetched by an automated tool does not license any of the uses above.

5. Requesting Permission

Permission requests are made through our contact form. Select the licensing or permissions topic where offered, and include:

  1. Your name and the organization you represent, if any;
  2. Identification of the specific Content you wish to use (title and URL of each essay, chart, or figure);
  3. How you intend to use it (medium, audience, print run or expected reach, and whether the use is commercial);
  4. Duration of the intended use and, for translations, the target language;
  5. Any deadline you are working against.

We normally respond within 5 business days. Permission for genuine educational use (courses at schools and universities, academic theses, nonprofit teaching material) is usually granted free of charge. Commercial licenses may involve a fee, which we will quote before you commit to anything. Permission, when granted, applies only to the use described in the request and does not transfer copyright.

6. Attribution Format

Where this policy or a granted permission requires attribution, please use the following format: publication name, essay title, and a link to the original page. For example: Source: Colbertism, "Essay Title" (link to the article). In print, replace the link with the full URL. In classroom slides, the publication name and essay title on the relevant slide are sufficient. Attribution must not suggest that Colbertism endorses you, your product, or your conclusions.

7. Third-Party Material and Fair Use

Our essays sometimes reproduce limited third-party material: short quotations from reports and news coverage, excerpts of official statistics, or small portions of charts published elsewhere. We use such material under the quotation and fair-use principles recognized by Indonesian copyright law and the Berne Convention: the amount used is limited to what the analysis requires, the source is cited, and the use is for commentary, criticism, or news reporting. Sourcing practices are described further in our Editorial Standards. If you are a rights holder and believe our use of your material exceeds these bounds, contact us through the contact form; we treat such objections as priority correspondence and will respond promptly, ordinarily within 3 business days, with removal, correction, or a reasoned explanation.

8. Trademark Notice

“Colbertism,” the Colbertism logo, and the visual identity of this site are trade identifiers of the publication. This policy licenses copyright in our Content only; it grants no right to use our name or logo. You may use the name “Colbertism” in plain text to refer to the publication accurately (for example, in attribution or commentary), but you may not use the name or logo in a way that implies affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement, or as branding for your own product or service.

9. Copyright Infringement Notices (DMCA Takedown Procedure)

Although Colbertism is operated from Indonesia and is not a United States service provider subject to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we voluntarily follow a DMCA-style notice-and-takedown procedure because it is clear, widely understood, and fair to both sides. If you believe material on this site (including material posted by readers in comments) infringes your copyright, submit a notice through the contact form, selecting the licensing topic. A valid notice must contain all of the following elements:

  1. Identification of the work. Describe the copyrighted work you claim is infringed, with enough detail for us to identify it (title, publication date, and a URL or copy of the original where available);
  2. Location of the material. The exact URL on Colbertism of each item you claim is infringing, plus a description of where on the page it appears if the page contains multiple items;
  3. Contact details. Your full name, postal address, and a means of reaching you for follow-up (notices may also be sent directly to [email protected]; include a telephone number or an address at which you accept correspondence, and monitor the channel you used);
  4. Good-faith statement. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use of the material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
  5. Accuracy statement. A statement that the information in the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the copyright owner or are authorized to act on the owner’s behalf;
  6. Signature. Your physical or electronic signature (a typed full legal name submitted through the form is accepted as an electronic signature).

Notices missing required elements will receive a reply identifying what is missing, but the response clock in this section does not start until a complete notice arrives. On receipt of a complete, valid notice, we will acknowledge it within 3 business days and will remove or disable access to the identified material within 7 business days unless we conclude, with stated reasons, that the notice is invalid or the use is plainly lawful. Where the material was posted by a reader, we will make reasonable efforts to notify that reader of the removal and provide them a copy of the notice, with your personal contact details withheld except as needed for a counter-notice or legal proceedings. Handling of personal data submitted in notices is described in our Privacy Policy.

10. Counter-Notice and Restoration

If your material was removed following a notice and you believe the removal was mistaken (for example, the use was licensed, quoted fairly, or misidentified), you may submit a counter-notice through the contact form containing: identification of the removed material and the URL where it appeared; your name, address, and contact details; a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification; your consent to resolve any resulting dispute under the jurisdiction described in Section 13; and your physical or electronic signature. We will forward the counter-notice to the original complainant. Unless the complainant informs us within 10 business days of forwarding that they have initiated legal proceedings concerning the material, we will restore it within 10 to 14 business days of receiving the counter-notice.

11. Repeat Infringers

Reader comments are the only user-submitted content on this site. We will remove infringing comments in response to valid notices and, where a commenter is the subject of repeated substantiated notices (as a guideline, three or more within any 12-month period), we will block further comments from that person and remove their prior comments at our discretion. Comment conduct generally is governed by our Terms of Use.

12. Misrepresentation and False Notices

Do not use the takedown procedure to suppress criticism, competition, or commentary you dislike. Anyone who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that material was removed by mistake, may be liable for damages, including costs incurred by Colbertism or by the affected reader in responding to the false notice. We reserve the right to ignore notices from senders with a history of material misrepresentation and to publish redacted copies of abusive notices.

13. International Copyright and Governing Law

Colbertism is operated from Indonesia. Our Content is protected in Indonesia under Law Number 28 of 2014 on Copyright and, in the more than 180 other member states of the Berne Convention, under each state’s national law without any registration formality. Copying our Content from outside Indonesia does not place the copying beyond the reach of copyright: infringement is actionable where it occurs as well as under Indonesian law. This policy, and any dispute arising from it, is governed by the laws of the Republic of Indonesia, as further described in our Terms of Use. Nothing in this policy limits any moral rights of attribution and integrity that Indonesian law grants to authors and that survive any license.

14. Changes to This Policy

We may revise this policy from time to time, for example to reflect changes in law, in the site’s features, or in our licensing practice. The current version, with its effective date, will always be published at this address, and material changes will be flagged on our legal hub. Revisions apply prospectively from their effective date; permissions granted in writing before a revision remain governed by the terms under which they were granted. Continued use of the site after a revision takes effect constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

15. Questions

Questions about this policy, about whether a planned use requires permission, or about the status of a pending notice or counter-notice should be sent through our contact form. We aim to answer general questions within 5 business days. For context on who operates this publication, see the about page; for how we handle accuracy, corrections, and sourcing, see our Editorial Standards and Disclaimer.