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Copyright and quotation
This site indexes and cites. It does not republish the documents it indexes.
We do not copy these books. We only quote small bits of them.
The book we quote most belongs to The Heritage Foundation. We quote one line here and there to show what it asks for. Then we link to their own copy so you can read the rest.
We count how much we quote. Right now it is far less than one part in a hundred. If it ever crept up too high, the site would stop and tell us.
Orders from the president are different. Those belong to everyone, so we can quote them freely.
The documents
The documents indexed here belong to their publishers and are not licensed to this site. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise is © 2023 The Heritage Foundation, all rights reserved. It is quoted here for reference and commentary, and every quotation links to the publisher's own freely available copy so a reader can check it in context.
Documents in the tracker are different: executive orders are works of the United States government, are not subject to copyright, and are linked and quoted freely.
How much is quoted, and why it is measured
The site quotes the sentence that carries a proposal, not the passage around it, and never the chapter. Because the risk of over-quoting accumulates across a book rather than appearing on any one page, the proportion is measured every time the site is built and the build fails if it drifts: no excerpt over 90 words, no chapter more than five per cent quoted, no more than five per cent of a work in total. The current figures are published on the methodology page.
This site's own material
The summaries, plain English renderings, match notes and the software that builds the site are the work of this site. Quotations from the documents are not, and remain their publishers' property.
Rights enquiries
If you hold rights in a document indexed here and believe a quotation exceeds what reference and commentary require, write to contact@readthemandate.org naming the page and the passage. Excerpt length is a dial this site is willing to turn down; the page citation and the link to your copy are what actually matter to a reader.