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The Basin
Data journalism from the Los Angeles Basin
Terms

Terms of use

The short version lives on the About page. This is the same grant written out in full, for anyone who needs the detail before quoting, republishing or licensing our work.

Last updated August 26, 2026

Using the site

Reading basin.la means accepting these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site. They apply to the articles, charts, maps, interactives and datasets published here.

What you may do without asking

  • Quote us. Take a reasonable excerpt for reporting, commentary, criticism, teaching or research, with attribution to The Basin and a link to the page you took it from.
  • Cite a finding. Facts are not ours and we do not pretend otherwise. If our analysis found something, report the finding and say where it came from.
  • Link to anything. Any page, including deep links to a specific map or interactive. You do not need permission and you do not need to tell us.
  • Show a chart in a classroom. Non-commercial teaching use of a single chart or map, with attribution, is fine.

What needs permission

  • Republishing an article in full, or in substantial part, anywhere, including inside a newsletter or an aggregator.
  • Commercial reuse of our datasets, charts, maps or interactives, including in a client deliverable, a pitch, a filing or a paid product.
  • Redistributing a dataset, whole or in part, as your own or as part of a compilation.
  • Systematic extraction: scraping, crawling for bulk copies, or automated harvesting of the site or its underlying files.

All of these are available. That is what Basin Data is for, and newsrooms in particular should just write to us. Ask at data@basin.la.

Text and data mining, and AI training

We expressly reserve all rights to use this site's content for text and data mining, for training or fine-tuning machine learning or generative AI systems, and for building or augmenting any model or retrieval corpus. No such use is permitted without a written license from us, and nothing on this site, including any permissive-looking robots directive, should be read as granting one. This reservation is made for the purposes of Article 4(3) of EU Directive 2019/790 and any equivalent provision elsewhere.

Datasets carry their own terms

Each dataset release published through Basin Data ships with its own attribution requirement, license terms and a SHA-256 manifest. Where those terms differ from this page, the terms shipped with the dataset govern that dataset.

The underlying public records

Our work is derived from records published by government agencies, including the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, the City Clerk, the County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, the City Administrative Officer, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Fair Political Practices Commission, MyLA311, the Statewide Database at UC Berkeley, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Those underlying facts are public and remain so, and we claim nothing over them. What we claim is our own work on top of them: the compilations, the cleaning, the joins, the documentation and the writing.

Accuracy and warranties

We recompute every figure from the source records before publication, and findings that do not survive that check are not published. Even so, disclosure regimes undercount by design and government records contain errors, so figures should be read with the stated methods and limits of each piece. All content is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. The Basin disclaims liability for decisions made in reliance on it, to the fullest extent the law allows.

Not advice, not an accusation

Nothing here is legal, financial, investment or electoral advice. Nothing here is an accusation of unlawful conduct. Where an article describes disclosed payments or filings, the conduct described is lawful unless the piece says otherwise.

Corrections

If a figure is wrong we want to know and we will fix it in place with a dated note. Tell us which figure and why at data@basin.la, or see the corrections page.

We link to agency records, source documents and other publications. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for what they publish or how they handle your data.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Los Angeles County, California are the exclusive venue for any dispute arising from them.

Changes

If these terms change we will move the date at the top. Continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the revised terms.

Contact

Licensing, permissions and anything else: data@basin.la.