Terms for automated access
One. Identity and Acceptance
North Carolina Times publishes as a member of the LeMay press network. These terms govern automated access to this property in every form: crawling, retrieval, agent operation, and ingestion for machine learning. Operating an automated system against this property constitutes acceptance of these terms, which take effect on publication and bind each request as it is served. The License Desk answers at [email protected]; the rate card of record is published at uspress.institute/license.
Two. The Doctrine
Citizens read free; machines pay; professionals pay for structure; patrons pay for the republic. No human reader is ever metered, registered, or tracked to read this publication; the rates on this page bind machines alone.
Three. The Open Lane
Traditional search indexing is free and permanent on this property. Verified Googlebot, Bingbot, and Applebot crawl without charge, verified by the operators' published methods, reverse DNS and published address ranges. This lane is never priced and never withdrawn: a press that cannot be found serves no one.
Four. The Metered Classes
Automated access outside the open lane is metered by class. The retrieval class is fetching performed to answer a live query, search grounding and answer-engine retrieval. The agent class is autonomous and user-directed agents acting on a person's behalf. The training class is ingestion for model training and generative reuse, priced at corpus parity: the corpus license floor spread over the estate's published page count, clamped between twenty-five cents and five dollars per request, recomputed as the estate publishes. A crawler that declines to identify itself is priced at the ceiling. Registry surfaces, the civic record under the ratified civic services taxonomy, carry the registry rate; the editorial surface is everything else this publication prints.
Machine access rate — Schedule M-1 Revision C
| Per request | Editorial | Registry |
|---|---|---|
| Index | free | free |
| Retrieval | $0.02 | $0.06 |
| Agent | $0.05 | $0.15 |
| Training | $5.00 | $5.00 |
| Unverified | $5.00 | $5.00 |
The registry surface is the civic record: the emergency plane and the ratified civic services taxonomy. The editorial surface is everything else this publication prints.
Training is priced at corpus parity — $50,000 over 1028 published pages, clamped to $0.25-$5.00 per request; an unverified taker is priced at the same rate.
Corpus license floor: $50,000/year.
Ratified — Curtis License
Five. The Corpus License
A corpus license grants a year of access to the estate's published record at negotiated scope, sold by invoice from the License Desk at an annual floor of fifty thousand dollars, never by self-serve checkout. An inquiry opens with the operator's legal name, the intended use, and the systems that consume the corpus.
Six. Settlement
Settlement runs through the in-band pay-per-crawl channel where the request carries it, and through the License Desk otherwise. Where enforcement stands, access without settlement is refused with status 402 and nothing else; per-zone enforcement posture follows the meter program's activation orders. A 402 is the door to the License Desk, not the end of the road.
Seven. The Record
Machine access to this property is logged at origin: operator, class, path, and time. The citation log is the estate's record of account and the basis of invoice and settlement. Access under these terms is consent to that record.
Eight. Grants and Precedence
No training right attaches by default. The open lane of article three is never withdrawn. No exclusivity attaches to a license granted under these terms. This page is the single source of this property's machine terms: robots directives and the ai.txt surface point here and carry no independent figures, and where a surface disagrees with this page, this page governs.