Terms of use

Last updated: September 22, 2026

Charterbend is published by Charterbend Publishing, LLC, of Birmingham, Alabama. These terms cover the pages at charterbend.digital and nothing else; the documents this publication links to belong to whoever filed them and carry their own terms.

Use of the site

Reading is free and requires nothing. There is no account, no registration, no paywall, and no subscription; the mailing list is optional and can be ended from any message it sends. Pages may be read, printed, saved, and linked to freely, and a link to any page here needs no permission.

Automated bulk collection of this site is not wanted, and it is also unnecessary. Every document cited anywhere here is listed at its own address in the source register, which is a far better route to the underlying material than a copy of these pages would be.

There is nothing here to log into and nothing to transact. This site carries no account field, no card field, no balance, and no simulation of any of them, and it never will.

Copyright in the text of this publication

The prose, the tables, the diagrams, the structure of the source register, and the arrangement of the pages are the work of the publisher. © 2026 Charterbend Publishing, LLC.

Short quotation is welcome without asking, on the ordinary condition that the publication is named and the page quoted is linked. Republishing a whole piece, or a substantial part of one, needs permission first, and a note to press@charterbend.digital is enough to ask for it. Nothing here may be republished in a way that suggests an institution this publication writes about had a hand in it.

How source documents are quoted here

The whole method of this site rests on quoting documents that other people wrote, so the line it draws is worth setting out.

• Facts and figures are not owned by anyone. A number in a federal register — an office count, a certificate number, a total — is not protected by copyright at all, because facts are not copyrightable; that is the holding of Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, 499 U.S. 340 (1991). An original selection of facts, and the prose written around them, are another matter, and are treated as protected.
• Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission are public, but they are the filer’s own work. The fact can be taken; the form of words cannot. This publication takes a short quotation, names the document, and links to the specific filing it came from. A filed document is never reproduced whole.
• A press release is protected. Quotation is short and attributed, in the same way.
• Fifty words is the ceiling. No quotation from a protected source on this site runs longer than fifty words, and every one of them carries its source and a link.
• Images of an institution are not used at all. No logo, no brand typeface, no brand colors, no icon, and no photograph of premises, signage, interiors, or staff. The images on this site are the publication’s own diagrams, its own mark and ornament, and two photographs of museum objects in the public domain — all listed, with their terms, on the image credits page.

The name of an institution is used here only to identify the institution, which is what the three conditions of nominative fair use ask for: that the subject cannot be identified without the mark, that no more of the mark is used than is needed, and that nothing suggests sponsorship or endorsement by the owner of it — New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, Inc., 971 F.2d 302 (9th Cir. 1992). The third condition is the reason the non-affiliation line stands in the footer of every page, and the reason no institution’s name appears in the domain, the wordmark, or the site name.

The sources have terms of their own, and they are kept. Public filing systems and public agency interfaces ask for a reasonable rate of requests and a declared identifier with a contact address; some registers restrict automated access outright. Every document behind this site was fetched one at a time, by hand, with the publication’s own identifier declared. There is no crawler and no scheduled collection.

Why no DMCA agent is designated

The safe harbors in section 512 of the Copyright Act are not a single thing. Subsection (c) covers material stored on a system at the direction of a user, and subsection (d) covers information location tools; both are conditioned on designating an agent with the Copyright Office and publishing that agent’s details. Subsections (a) and (b) — transitory digital network communications and system caching — carry no such condition. The text is at 17 U.S.C. § 512, and the designation requirement at subsection (c)(2).

Charterbend stores nothing at the direction of a user. There are no comments, no reviews, no ratings, no uploads, no profiles, no forums, and no reader pages; every word, table, and diagram on this site is placed here by the publication. It is not a search tool either. It therefore does not rely on the harbors at (c) and (d), and it has designated no agent.

That is this publication’s reading of its own position, and it is offered as nothing more. The Copyright Office’s own guidance is worded more broadly than the statute — it speaks of any service provider seeking the protections of section 512 — and no claim is made here that the Office agrees, that an agent is unnecessary for anybody else, or that the question is settled in the abstract. It is a statement about this site, whose shape happens to make the question easy.

The corollary matters more than the rule. If comments, reviews, or uploads were ever switched on here, an agent would have to be registered with the Copyright Office first, or the section 512(c) harbor would simply not be available. Reviews are forbidden outright for a separate reason, set out on the standards page.

A copyright complaint is still answered

A complaint that something on this site infringes a copyright goes to press@charterbend.digital, or by post to Charterbend Publishing, LLC, P.O. Box 55104, Birmingham, AL 35255. It is answered within five business days. Because nothing here is user-supplied, a decision to take something down is a decision the publication makes about its own work, and it is made on the merits rather than reflexively.

No investment advice

Charterbend does not provide investment advice. It does not rate, recommend or value any security or institution, and nothing here is an offer or a solicitation to buy or sell anything.

That statement, and the editorial rules behind it, are set out at length on the independence page, together with the rule that nobody at this publication holds or trades the securities of an institution it writes about.

What this site does not promise

Every page states the date it was last checked and the documents it rests on. That is the whole of the assurance offered, and it is offered honestly: a figure taken from a register is true as of the date printed beside it and not afterwards, a document link can move when the system holding it is reindexed, and an institution can change something the day after a page was verified. The re-verification cadence on the standards page is how that is managed, not a guarantee that it never happens.

Nothing on this site is a substitute for reading the document itself, which is why every document is named, identified, and linked. Decisions taken on the strength of anything read here are the reader’s own; this publication has no way of knowing what they are and does not set out to influence them.

Changes to these terms

The date at the top of this page records the last change. Material changes are made here before they take effect on the site, and the date moves with them.