Copyright & Takedown Policy

In short.

  • We own or license everything on our Sites that we publish ourselves.
  • You may quote, share and link to our content within the limits of UK fair dealing. Anything more needs our written agreement.
  • You may not use our content to train AI models.
  • If you believe content on the Sites infringes your rights, follow the takedown procedure in §6. We respond promptly.
  • If you are accused of infringement, you can submit a counter-notice. We will not act on a takedown unless we are reasonably satisfied it is well-founded.

1. Why this policy exists

This policy tells you who owns the content on our Sites, what you may and may not do with it, and how to ask us to take down content if you believe it infringes your rights.

In this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean Disrupts Media Limited, the publisher of the Sites.

This policy is part of our Terms of Use and read alongside the Acceptable Use Policy and the AI Use Policy.

2. Who owns what

  • Our editorial content — articles, analysis, photographs, illustrations, audio, video, newsletter copy, datasets we publish, and the look and feel of the Sites — is owned by Disrupts Media Limited or licensed to us by the contributor who supplied it.
  • Our trade marks, including the publication names (The Biotech Times, The Fintech Times, The Datatech Times, Disrupts) and the corporate name Disrupts Media, are owned by Disrupts Media Limited. Use of our trade marks requires our prior written agreement.
  • Third-party content appears on the Sites under licence — for example, supplied press imagery, news-wire material, contributed pieces, embedded social-media posts. The underlying rights remain with the third party.
  • Reader-submitted content — comments, contributions, story tips — remains owned by the person who submitted it; we have the licence to use it that is set out in §5 of the Terms of Use.

3. What you may do with our content

You may, without asking us first:

  • Read, save and print articles for your own personal or professional reference, non-commercially.
  • Share article links on social media, in email and in any other context.
  • Quote short, attributed extracts of our content in line with the UK "fair dealing" exceptions in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 — specifically, for the purposes of criticism, review, quotation or news reporting. Attribute by publication name and link to the original article.
  • Subscribe to our RSS feeds in a personal feed reader.

We expect attribution to take the form: "As reported in The Biotech Times: [headline]" with a hyperlink to the original article. Where attribution is technically impractical (e.g. a printed publication), the equivalent text-only attribution applies.

4. What you may not do without our written agreement

  • Republish or syndicate our content, in whole or in substantial part, in any other publication, app or platform.
  • Sell access to, or copies of, our content.
  • Scrape, mirror or systematically download our content, whether or not our robots.txt allows it.
  • Frame our content within another site or app so as to obscure its origin.
  • Remove or alter any attribution, copyright notice, AI-image watermark or other marker on our content.
  • Use our content to train artificial-intelligence models, large language models, or any other automated system that produces derivative output. This applies whether or not our content is technically accessible to your training pipeline. We do not consent to such use.
  • Use our trade marks, logos or visual identity in a way that suggests endorsement, partnership or commercial association.

Requests to do any of the above — including licensing for republication or AI training — should be sent to legal@disruptsmedia.com.

5. Our position on AI training

We treat our editorial content as a deliberate, expensive investment in original journalism. Allowing our content to be used to train AI models, free of charge and without permission, would undermine the commercial model that funds that journalism.

We therefore make clear, in writing here and in our Acceptable Use Policy §2.5, that consent is required for any use of our content to train AI or other systems that produce derivative output. We may take legal action against unauthorised AI training on our content.

Operators of AI training crawlers: please respect this position. Our robots.txt files signal it; this policy confirms it; and the absence of robots.txt instructions for a particular crawler is not consent.

6. Takedown — how to ask us to remove content you believe infringes your rights

If you believe that content on the Sites infringes your copyright, trade mark or another intellectual-property right, you can ask us to take it down. Send a notice to legal@disruptsmedia.com containing all of the following:

  1. Your name, postal address and a working email address.
  2. A description of the work or rights you say have been infringed (for example, the URL of your original article, the registration details of your trade mark).
  3. The URL or URLs of the content on our Sites that you say is infringing.
  4. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use of the material on our Sites is not authorised by you, the rights holder, or by law.
  5. A statement, made under penalty of perjury or its UK equivalent, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are authorised to act on behalf of the rights holder.
  6. Your physical or electronic signature.

We may need to share your notice — including your contact details — with the person who posted the content, with our hosting and infrastructure providers, and with any platforms involved in the case, so they can respond.

We will not act on:

  • vague or partial notices that do not identify the content or the rights;
  • notices that are clearly being used to suppress fair comment, review or news reporting;
  • notices from people who do not own the right they assert.

We do, however, take genuine notices very seriously and act on them quickly.

7. What we will do when we receive a valid takedown notice

  • Acknowledge receipt of the notice within five working days.
  • Review the notice against the criteria in §6.
  • Where the notice is well-founded, either remove the content, edit it, or replace it with a notice that the original has been removed.
  • Tell you what we have done.
  • Tell the person who posted the content (where they are identifiable) that we have acted on a takedown notice, and give them the chance to submit a counter-notice (§8).

We may make a different editorial choice — for example, to leave the content up with attribution amended, or to publish a clarification — if we conclude that the underlying complaint can be resolved without removing the content. We will explain that to the complainant.

8. Counter-notice — what to do if your content has been removed

If your content was removed from the Sites and you believe the takedown was wrong, you can submit a counter-notice to legal@disruptsmedia.com containing:

  1. Your name, postal address and a working email address.
  2. Identification of the content that was removed and where on the Sites it appeared before removal.
  3. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the content was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
  4. A statement of consent to the jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales for any action arising out of the counter-notice.
  5. Your physical or electronic signature.

On receipt of a valid counter-notice, we will share it with the original complainant and decide, on the balance of the two notices, whether to restore the content. If the matter cannot be resolved between the parties, the dispute may need to be settled in court.

9. Repeat infringers

We may suspend or close the account of any user who repeatedly posts content that infringes the rights of others, in line with the enforcement ladder in §3 of the Acceptable Use Policy.

10. Where this policy fits with other law

This policy is intended to operate alongside, not in place of, the rights and remedies you have under UK law — including under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the Trade Marks Act 1994, the UK GDPR (for personal data), and the law of confidence and passing off. It does not limit your statutory rights.

11. Contact us

Copyright, trade mark and other IP matters: legal@disruptsmedia.com General: hello@disruptsmedia.com Post: Legal, Disrupts Media Limited, 41 Luke Street, London EC2A 4DP, United Kingdom

12. About Disrupts Media

Disrupts Media Limited Registered in England & Wales — Company No. 09447878 Registered office: 41 Luke Street, London EC2A 4DP, United Kingdom

13. Document history

| Date | Version | Change | |---|---|---| | 2026-05-14 | 1.0 | Initial policy. Establishes ownership of editorial content; permitted personal / fair-dealing uses; non-permitted uses including AI-training prohibition; takedown procedure with explicit notice requirements; counter-notice route; repeat-infringer position. Cross-references Terms of Use, AI Use Policy and Acceptable Use Policy. |