Terms of Use - Colbertism

Plain-language summary: Colbertism is a free, independent publication covering economics and markets. You are welcome to read our work, link to it, quote it with credit, and use it in classrooms within sensible limits. In return, we ask that you not republish our articles wholesale, scrape the site at scale, feed our archive into machine-learning training sets without permission, or interfere with our infrastructure. We publish with care, but the site is provided as is, our content is not financial advice, and our legal responsibility to you is limited. These Terms of Use are governed by the laws of the Republic of Indonesia. If anything here is unclear, ask us through the contact form.

Effective date: August 13, 2026.

1. Acceptance of These Terms

These Terms of Use (the “Terms”) form a binding agreement between you and the operator of Colbertism regarding your access to and use of the Site. By visiting the Site, reading its Content, subscribing to the newsletter, submitting a comment, or contacting us through the contact form, you accept these Terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the Site.

You may use the Site if you are at least 13 years of age (or the higher minimum age required in your jurisdiction for consenting to online services) and are legally capable of entering into a binding agreement. If you access the Site on behalf of a company, school, or other organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization, and “you” in these Terms includes that organization.

These Terms incorporate by reference our Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Disclaimer, Advertising Disclosure, and Copyright and DMCA Policy. Where a specific policy addresses a topic in more detail, that policy governs the topic.

2. Definitions

For clarity, the following terms have the meanings given below wherever they appear capitalized in this document:

“Site” means the Colbertism website, including all pages, feeds, forms, and features made available under our domain, together with the newsletter we distribute by email.
“Content” means everything we publish or display on the Site, including essays, articles, analyses, charts, tables, figures, data visualizations, images, code snippets, headlines, summaries, and the selection and arrangement of all of these.
“User Content” means material you submit to the Site, including comments, replies, and information sent through the contact form or the newsletter subscribe form.
“We,” “us,” and “our” refer to the operator of Colbertism, an independent publisher based in Indonesia. Details about the publication are available on our About page.
“You” and “your” refer to any person or organization accessing or using the Site.

3. License Granted to Readers

We grant you a personal, worldwide, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to access and read the Content for your own informational, personal, and non-commercial purposes. This license includes the right to:

view Content in your browser and in ordinary reader applications, including via our RSS feed for personal reading;
print or save single copies of individual articles for your own reference;
share links to our pages on social networks, in messages, and in bibliographies, including with the headline and any preview text generated by the platform; and
quote from the Content as described below.

Quoting and Attribution

You may quote up to 150 words from any single article without asking us first, provided that you (a) attribute the quotation to Colbertism, (b) link to the original article where your medium supports links or cite the URL where it does not, and (c) do not present the quotation in a way that distorts its meaning. You may reproduce a single chart or figure from an article for commentary or criticism under the same attribution conditions, provided the image is not altered except for resizing. Anything beyond these limits, including republication of full articles, translations, or systematic excerpting across many articles, requires our prior written permission, which you can request through the contact form.

This license does not transfer any ownership to you, and we may revoke it with respect to any person who violates these Terms. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

4. Intellectual Property Ownership

We own, or hold licenses to, all Content on the Site. Our essays, charts, tables, figures, and data visualizations are original works protected by copyright law, including Indonesian Law No. 28 of 2014 on Copyright and international treaties. The Colbertism name and any associated logos are our identifiers and may not be used in a way that suggests affiliation or endorsement without written consent.

Facts, ideas, and public statistical data are not owned by anyone, and nothing in these Terms restricts your use of the underlying facts we report. What we claim is the expression: the writing, the design of our charts and tables, the structure of our analyses, and the selection and arrangement of data. Where we chart data from third-party sources (for example, central banks or statistical agencies), the underlying data remains subject to its original source terms, and our credit lines identify those sources.

If you believe any Content infringes your copyright, please follow the procedure in our Copyright and DMCA Policy.

5. User Content

License You Grant Us

You retain ownership of your User Content. By posting a comment on the Site, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to host, store, reproduce, display, excerpt, and moderate that comment on the Site for as long as the related article remains published, and to quote brief passages from it in follow-up articles or reader mailbags with attribution to the name you posted under. Material sent through the contact form is treated as correspondence and handled as described in our Privacy Policy; we will not publish contact form messages without asking you first.

Standards of Conduct

When submitting User Content, you agree that it will not:

be defamatory, harassing, threatening, or hateful toward any person or group;
contain material you do not have the right to share, including copyrighted text reproduced beyond fair-use limits or confidential information;
contain spam, chain messages, undisclosed promotional material, or link schemes;
impersonate any person, misstate your affiliation, or misrepresent a comment as coming from us;
include malicious code, phishing links, or instructions designed to harm other readers; or
violate any applicable law, including Indonesian law and the law of your own jurisdiction.

Moderation and No Obligation to Publish

Comment moderation is at our discretion. We may hold comments in a queue, edit them to remove links or personal data, decline to publish them, or remove them after publication, in each case without notice and without giving reasons. We are under no obligation to publish, retain, or archive any User Content. You may ask us to delete your own past comments through the contact form, and we will honor reasonable requests within 30 days. Opinions expressed in comments belong to their authors, and publishing a comment does not mean we endorse it.

6. Prohibited Conduct

In connection with the Site, you agree not to:

Scrape at scale. Do not use bots, crawlers, or automated scripts to download the Site’s Content in bulk, mirror the Site, or build a database of our articles. Ordinary search-engine indexing that respects our robots.txt file, and occasional single-page retrieval by personal tools, are permitted.
Ingest Content into machine-learning corpora. Do not use the Content, in whole or in part, to train, fine-tune, ground, or evaluate any machine-learning or artificial-intelligence model, or include it in datasets distributed for those purposes, without our prior written permission obtained through the contact form. Directives in our robots.txt file addressing AI crawlers form part of this restriction.
Probe our security. Do not scan for vulnerabilities, attempt to bypass access controls or rate limits, test our forms with injected code, overload the Site with requests, or otherwise interfere with its operation. If you discover a security issue in good faith, report it privately through the contact form; we welcome responsible disclosure and will not pursue good-faith reporters.
Send spam. Do not use our comment areas or forms to distribute unsolicited advertising, and do not harvest email addresses or other data about our readers.
Impersonate. Do not pose as Colbertism, its writers, or another reader, and do not use our name or branding to lend false credibility to your own material, including AI-generated summaries presented as ours.
Use the Site unlawfully. Do not access or use the Site in violation of applicable law, including export, sanctions, market-manipulation, and computer-misuse laws.

We may investigate suspected violations and take proportionate technical and legal measures, including those described in Section 12 (Termination of Access).

7. Educational Use

We want our work to be useful in classrooms, and our default answer to educators is yes. Teachers, lecturers, and students may, without asking us first:

distribute printed or digital copies of up to two Colbertism articles per course term to an enrolled class, with attribution and the original URL included;
display articles, charts, and figures in lectures and seminars; and
cite and quote the Content in coursework, theses, and academic papers under normal citation practice.

For bulk use, please ask first through the contact form: this includes course packs containing more than two articles, uploads of full articles to learning-management systems accessible beyond a single class, inclusion in textbooks or commercial training materials, and institution-wide distribution. We typically respond within 10 business days, and permission for genuinely educational, non-commercial use is rarely refused. This section does not authorize the machine-learning uses prohibited in Section 6, even in academic settings.

8. Affiliate Links: Pre-Committed Rules

As of the effective date, the Site contains no affiliate links, no sponsored content, and no paid placements. If we ever adopt affiliate links, the following rules will apply from the first day of use, and we commit to them now:

Every page containing an affiliate link will carry a clear disclosure near the link or at the top of the article.
Affiliate relationships will never influence our editorial conclusions; we will not recommend a product or service because it pays us, and our Editorial Standards will continue to govern all analysis.
We will update our Advertising Disclosure before the first affiliate link appears, describing the programs involved and how compensation works.
Sponsored content and paid placements will remain off the table regardless of any affiliate program.

9. Third-Party Links, Advertising, and No Endorsement

Our articles link to external sources, datasets, and commentary. These links are provided for reference. We do not control third-party sites, we do not endorse their content, and we are not responsible for their accuracy, availability, or privacy practices. Your use of a third-party site is governed by that site’s own terms.

The Site may display third-party advertising, including through Google AdSense. Advertisers do not see who you are through us, and ads are not endorsements. How advertising works on the Site, including the cookies involved and how to opt out of personalized ads through Google Ads Settings, aboutads.info, or youronlinechoices.eu, is described in our Advertising Disclosure and Cookie Policy.

10. Disclaimer of Warranties

In plain terms: we work hard to be accurate, but we cannot promise perfection, and you use the Site at your own risk.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the Site and all Content are provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory. We specifically disclaim any warranty of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, reliability, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and uninterrupted or error-free availability. Economic data gets revised, forecasts fail, markets move, and articles that were accurate when published can become outdated without notice. We are under no obligation to update past Content.

Nothing on the Site is investment, financial, legal, tax, or accounting advice, and no reader relationship with us creates an advisory relationship. Our Disclaimer explains this in detail and forms part of these Terms.

11. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we will not be liable to you for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages arising out of or relating to the Site or these Terms. This includes, without limitation, lost profits, trading or investment losses, lost data, loss of goodwill, business interruption, and the cost of substitute services, even if we have been advised that such damages are possible, and regardless of the legal theory (contract, tort, negligence, or otherwise).

To the same maximum extent, our total aggregate liability for all claims arising out of or relating to the Site or these Terms is capped at the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) USD 100 (or its equivalent in Indonesian rupiah). Because the Site is free to read, the cap will ordinarily be USD 100.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of liability for certain types of damages, including liability for gross negligence, willful misconduct, death, or personal injury. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, and where the law permits only a partial limitation, Sections 10 and 11 apply to the fullest extent the law allows.

12. Termination of Access

You may stop using the Site at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access to all or part of the Site, block network addresses, remove your User Content, and unsubscribe abusive addresses from the newsletter if you materially violate these Terms, if your use threatens the security or integrity of the Site, or if we are required to do so by law. Where practical and lawful, we will act proportionately: a first offense of a minor kind (for example, an overly aggressive personal scraper) will usually draw a warning or a temporary block before anything permanent.

Sections 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15 survive any termination of these Terms or of your access to the Site.

13. Indemnification

Stated plainly: if your misuse of the Site gets us sued, you cover the cost. You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from third-party claims, and the reasonable costs of defending them (including reasonable attorneys’ fees), to the extent the claim arises from (a) your User Content, (b) your violation of these Terms, or (c) your violation of law or of a third party’s rights in connection with the Site. This obligation is limited in fairness: we will notify you promptly of any such claim, we will not settle it on your behalf without your consent (which you will not unreasonably withhold), and you may participate in the defense at your own expense. This section does not apply to claims arising from our own Content or our own conduct.

14. Governing Law and Dispute Resolution

These Terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of them or the Site, are governed by the laws of the Republic of Indonesia, without regard to conflict-of-law principles. If you access the Site from elsewhere, you are responsible for compliance with your local laws, and any mandatory consumer protections of your home jurisdiction that apply by law remain unaffected by this choice of law.

Before starting formal proceedings, both sides agree to try to resolve the dispute informally: send us a description of the issue through the contact form, and we will engage in good-faith negotiation for at least 60 days from your first message. Most problems can be fixed with a correction, a clarification, or a conversation. If negotiation fails, the dispute will be submitted to the competent courts of the Republic of Indonesia, and both parties consent to their jurisdiction. Either party may seek interim injunctive relief in any competent court where necessary to prevent irreparable harm, such as ongoing infringement.

15. General Provisions

Severability. If any provision of these Terms is held invalid or unenforceable, that provision will be enforced to the maximum extent permissible and the remaining provisions stay in full force.
Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the policies incorporated by reference in Section 1, constitute the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Site and supersede any prior understandings on the subject.
Waiver. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of it. A waiver is effective only if we state it in writing, and it applies only to the specific instance described.
Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms or any rights under them without our written consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a transfer of the publication (for example, a change of operator or corporate form), and we will note any such change on the Site.
Headings and summaries. Headings and the plain-language summary at the top of this page are aids to reading. If a summary and a clause conflict, the clause controls.

16. Changes to These Terms of Use

We may revise these Terms from time to time, for example when we add features, adopt affiliate links under the rules in Section 8, or respond to legal changes. When we do, we will post the updated Terms at this address with a new effective date. For material changes (changes that meaningfully reduce your rights or expand your obligations), we will also post a notice on the Site, and, where feasible, mention the change in the newsletter, at least 14 days before the new Terms take effect. Your continued use of the Site after the effective date of revised Terms constitutes acceptance of them. If you do not agree with a revision, your remedy is to stop using the Site. Earlier versions of these Terms are available on request.

17. Questions and Contact

Correspondence is welcome at [email protected] or through the on-site form. If any part of these Terms is unclear, if you want permission beyond the licenses granted here (bulk educational use, republication, translation, or machine-learning licensing), or if you believe we have made an error, please reach us through the contact form. We read every message and aim to reply to substantive legal questions within 10 business days. Our other policies are collected on the legal hub.