Copyright, reuse and licensing
Short version: read it, print it, quote it, hand it out. Do not republish it as yours, and do not scrape it. If you are an organization that wants to use this material properly — a court, a legal aid program, a firm, a benefits provider — there is a door for that at the bottom of this page.
The short version4 points · tap one to jump to it
In this subject 5
What you may do, without asking
This is deliberately more generous than the standard notice, because the point of writing this was for people to use it.
- Read, print and save anything here for your own use, or for the use of someone you are helping.
- Quote a reasonable extract with attribution and a link to the page it came from. If you are a journalist, a researcher, a lawyer writing a client letter, or somebody explaining a rule to a friend, this covers you and we would rather you did it than not.
- Link to any page here, from anywhere, without asking.
- Print pages for a client, a support group, a shelter, a clinic or a courthouse self-help desk. If you work somewhere that helps people through this and you want to hand our pages out, do it. You do not need our permission and we would like to hear about it.
- Use the facts. A statute is a statute and a filing fee is a filing fee. Nobody owns those, including us.
- Republish one of the comparison tables in full, if you are a library, a law library, a legal aid program, a court, a shelter, a domestic violence coalition, a newsroom, a bar association or a non-profit. This is a deliberate exception to the rule below, and it applies only to the pages that say so on the page itself — filing fees, e-filing, automatic orders, protective orders, firearms surrender and paywalled statutes. Each carries its own conditions, which are the same three every time: name The Cusp, include the address of the page, and show the date it was last checked. Commercial republication is not included — see below.
What you may not do
- Republish a page, or a substantial part of one, as your own content. That includes rewriting it lightly and putting your name on it.
- Feed the site to a scraper and rebuild it somewhere else, with or without a chatbot in front of it.
- Use our name, or the phrase Cusp Verified, in a way that suggests we endorse you, your firm, or your product.
- Present our material as legal advice, yours or ours.
- Remove the source lines. They are the reason the pages are worth anything.
We are not precious about being read by machines. We are precious about being replaced by one. The value here is not the sentences, it is that somebody went and read the statute, wrote down what it said, dated it, and said so when they could not confirm something. A copy of the sentences without the checking is worse than useless, because it looks the same and goes stale silently.
Copyright, plainly, for anyone who wants to know how this works
Not advice, and not about your situation. Just the shape of it, because people ask.
Copyright exists from the moment something original is written down. Registration is not what creates it.
In the United States, registration is generally a precondition to filing an infringement suit for a US work, and timely registration is what makes statutory damages and attorney fees available rather than only actual damages. That is the practical difference between a claim worth bringing and one that is not.
Facts, statutes, court rules, fee amounts, deadlines and ideas. Our expression of them is ours. The underlying law belongs to everyone, and we would not want it otherwise.
The United States Copyright Office, at copyright.gov. A website can be registered, and there are specific rules for works that are updated frequently, which a site like this one is.
If you think we have infringed yours
Tell us and we will look at it the same day. We quote sparingly, we link to sources rather than reproducing them, and we do not host other people’s photographs or text. If we have got that wrong somewhere, we want to fix it rather than argue about it. Write to hello@thecusp.app with the page and what is on it. If you need to send a formal notice, send it to the same address.
Courts, legal aid programs, bar associations, law firms, mediators, financial advisers, employers and benefits providers all need accurate, current, state-specific material to put in front of the people they serve, and almost none of them want to write it. We license this content, including the maintenance — which is the part that actually matters, because a plain-language library that is not kept current is a liability rather than an asset.
What that can look like: a white-labeled section of your own site, a feed your platform pulls from so it updates when the law changes, or a defined set of pages for a self-help desk. Write to hello@thecusp.app with what you serve and roughly how many people, and we will tell you honestly whether we are a fit.
Where the line falls. Reuse by a library, a law library, a legal aid program, a court, a shelter, a domestic violence coalition, a newsroom, a bar association or a non-profit is free, and always will be on the pages that grant it. Reuse by a commercial republisher — a brokerage, a law firm, a legal-forms company, a lead-generation site or a software product — is not covered by that grant and needs written permission. We will almost certainly give it, on the same three conditions, and for a commercial use at any scale there is a fee, because the maintenance is the product and somebody has to pay for it. Asking costs nothing and we answer the same day.
Copyright The Cusp. This page last set out 31 August 2026. It is a statement of what we claim and what we permit, not legal advice to you about your own work. Terms of service.Advertise with us Privacy policy.