Subscription law is where generic content goes to become quietly wrong. Statutes get amended, rules get vacated, effective dates slip — and a page written confidently in one year misleads politely in the next. This site treats that as an engineering problem, and this article describes the system that results. It exists so that when a page of ours says “verified”, you can see exactly what that word costs us to write.
Rule one: primary sources, opened on the day of writing
Every legal statement on a rights page traces to a primary source — the legislature's own statute text, the enrolled act, the regulator's published rule or official announcement — opened on the day the page was built. Not a summary of a summary: the Virginia page cites Virginia's legislative information system; the Maine page cites the Revisor of Statutes; the Louisiana page cites the enrolled act itself. Where only a reputable secondary survey was available, the page says less and hedges more.
Rule two: every claim carries a date somebody stood behind
Each sourced fact lives in a central registry with a verification date — the day a human-checked pipeline actually opened the source. That date is printed on the page (“Source: …, verified on …”). A legal claim without a date is a rumour with good formatting.
Rule three: content degrades instead of silently aging
The part we are proudest of. Every registry fact has two forms: the specific claim (“notice must arrive 30 to 60 days before the deadline”) and a timeless fallback (“check the current statute text for the notice requirements in force”). When a fact's verification date exceeds its review horizon, the pages consuming it automatically render the fallback instead of the stale specific. An unreviewed page on this site becomes vaguer, never wronger.
Rule four: enacted is not in force
Several of the biggest recent laws were signed long before they applied — Louisiana's 2026 act takes effect in 2027; the UK's DMCC subscription chapter is law but not yet commenced. Our pages state both dates and refuse to blur them, because the gap between “signed” and “in force” is precisely where consumers and businesses both get it wrong.
Rule five: negative findings are published, not papered over
Where a state has no subscription statute — Texas, Nevada, Missouri, Iowa — the page says so and explains what applies instead, rather than importing another state's rules to have something impressive to say. A verified “no” is worth more than a plausible “yes”.
Rule six: machines enforce what humans forget
The rules above are backed by automated gates that run before anything ships: a test that rejects any registry fact without an https source and a verification date, one that rejects fallbacks containing dates or figures (a fallback must be unconditionally true), one that requires every mention of the vacated federal click-to-cancel rule to carry its status, one that forces every state page into the state index so nothing publishes unlisted, and a full crawl of every URL before release. Several of these tests have corrected our own drafts — which is the point.
What this does not claim
None of this makes the pages legal advice, and none of it substitutes for a lawyer on a contested case — every rights page says so explicitly. The system's promise is narrower and, we think, more honest: what is stated was true of the cited source on the stated date, and when we have not re-checked, the page tells you to check rather than pretending.