Sources & fair use — The Delta Desk

How this site uses source material

What a short is: Each short is an original summary, roughly two hundred words, written in fresh words, of facts reported elsewhere — plus a commentary line that is entirely the editor’s own judgement. Copyright protects a writer’s expression: their words, their structure, their creative choices. It has never protected facts, and news is made of facts. The Delta Desk reports the facts and writes its own expression. No paragraph, sentence or distinctive phrasing from a source article is reproduced on this site. When a person’s words are quoted, the quotation is brief, attributed, and carried as reported speech.
Credit and links: Every short names and links the outlets it draws on, aiming for the original publisher rather than an aggregator or a site carrying someone else’s wire copy. The links are the point: a short is a reason to read the original, not a substitute for it. Credit is given as a matter of respect for the reporting — not claimed as a licence, which it is not.
What is not on this site: No article text or excerpts. No photographs, illustrations or artwork from any publisher — the only images here are the site’s own, drawn in code. No paywalled content resurfaced. No republication of anyone’s feed.
What happens behind the scenes: To decide what to cover and to check every draft against its sources, the system reads publishers’ public RSS feeds — published precisely to be read — and the articles they point to, so the editor can verify each fact before publication. Nothing fetched is ever republished. The site’s crawler identifies itself honestly as DeltaDeskBot, with this site’s address attached, and honours publishers’ robots.txt.
Translation: Some sources are Vietnamese-language and are marked as such. Machine translation is used internally as a review aid, so the editor can verify facts against the original reporting. Published shorts are written fresh in English from the facts — never adapted or translated from a source’s text.
If you are a rights holder: If you publish one of the sources cited here and object to how your work is referenced, write to contact@sumitnangia.com with the link and the objection. It will be answered, and if something is wrong it will be corrected, the reference changed, or the short withdrawn. The same address handles corrections; the same promise applies.
The legal position, plainly: The line between free facts and protected expression is close to universal — it is a foundation of the Berne Convention, which nearly every country has signed. Where doctrines differ is at the edges: the United States has fair use, Commonwealth countries have fair dealing for news reporting and review, and the European Union gives press publishers additional rights over the reuse of their publications. This site is designed not to live at those edges: its own words, credited sources, no reproduction. If it ever launches commercially, its source list will be reviewed jurisdiction by jurisdiction before launch — including licensing conversations where the law of a publisher’s country asks for one.
If this becomes commercial: Today this is a personal project with no revenue. If that changes, this page, the About page and the Privacy page change first — and the standards above do not: they are the point of the site, not a stage it grows out of.