Sources, Attribution and Third-Party Rights

1. The principle

The Wire is a secondary source. Almost everything in it originates somewhere else, and it says so on every item. Our rule when choosing a source is licence first, price second: a feed we cannot lawfully republish does not help a register meant to be sold, however good it is and however cheap.

Three things follow from that, and they are the design of the product rather than decoration:

1. We link out rather than replace. A story shows a headline, a short machine-written summary and a link. The point of the summary is to get you to the publisher, not to save you from going.
2. We attribute at the point of use, not in a credits page nobody reads.
3. We prefer primary public records — registries, filings, merger registers — over reporting about them, because those are both better evidence and cleaner to license.

2. What we take, from whom

2.1 Trade and financial press

Headlines, a short extract or machine-written summary, the publication name, and a link to the original. Sources include the entertainment trade press, the financial press and specialist industry publications, gathered from their own feeds and from news indexes.

Headlines and extracts remain the copyright of their publishers. We reproduce them to identify the report and send the reader to it. We do not reproduce articles, we do not substitute for them, and we do not remove a publisher's byline.

Position: reliance on the publisher's own syndication feed, on the linking and short-extract norms of news aggregation, and on fair dealing for reporting current events under section 30 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. See section 4.1 for the limit of that position.

2.2 Public registries and filings

Companies House (UK), and the national company registers of France, Sweden, Ireland, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Japan and others; the merger registers and case records of the European Commission, the Competition and Markets Authority, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and the Bundeskartellamt; and securities filings.

Position: open data. Ireland's CRO is CC-BY; several EU registers are published under Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 as high-value datasets, free and re-usable. Attribution is given where the licence requires it.

2.3 Wikipedia and Wikidata

Company facts and one-line descriptions on company cards.

Position: Wikidata is CC0 — no conditions. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA 4.0, which requires attribution and is share-alike: a derivative of Wikipedia text must be released under the same licence. Our footer credits "Company facts: Wikipedia / Wikidata (CC BY-SA)". See section 4.3.

2.4 Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF)

Legal Entity Identifiers on register rows.

Position: GLEIF publishes LEI data under CC0. No restriction.

2.5 Market data

Prices, quotes and sparklines for listed constituents, supplied by Yahoo Finance, labelled as such, and may be delayed. See section 4.2.

2.6 Social signal

Public posts from Bluesky, quoted with the author's handle and a link to the post.

Position: Bluesky's protocol is open and posts are public. We quote, attribute and link. A post is removed on request from its author.

2.7 The Movie Database (TMDB)

Title credits and recent credited titles for companies in the register — the "still producing" signal that identifies a live production company. 1,131 register rows carry a TMDB identifier and 1,096 carry TMDB-derived title data, measured 4 September 2026. See section 3 — this is the one that matters.

2.8 Other identifier sources

Crunchbase and OpenCorporates identifiers appear on some register rows (687 and 274 rows respectively). We hold identifiers only, not their content. An identifier is a pointer, and we take the view that a bare pointer is not the protected part of anyone's database — but that is a view, and it is worth a lawyer's minute.

3. TMDB — the open item

This is not a theoretical exposure and it should be resolved before the paywall goes up.

TMDB's API terms permit commercial use only under a separate written agreement, prohibit deriving revenue from the data, prohibit derivative works, and cap caching at six months. The register that TMDB data sits in is served to paying subscribers as part of the Monthly, Annual and Team plans. Charging for access to a product containing that data is the thing the terms address directly.

The publisher's standing decision, taken 24 August 2026, was to keep TMDB "for now… if we ever make money and we still have data of theirs we can do a deal. If at the time of launch we have found a way to replace them great." That condition has now arrived.

The three exits, in order of preference:

1. A written agreement with TMDB. They have a commercial licensing route and the volume here is small. This is the cheapest fix and it makes the field an asset rather than a risk.
2. Replace the signal. National film and television registers, and production databases with usable terms, can carry some of it — but TMDB is genuinely the best free source for the micro-producer tail, so replacement is not a weekend.
3. Withhold it from the paid product. Strip tc and tr from the served register export and keep TMDB as an internal finder only, the way openregister is already handled: used to find things, with the published fact attributed to an independently verifiable source. This is a one-line change to the export and it is available immediately.

Until one of those is done, this page should not be published in a form that implies the position is settled.

4. The other three positions worth a lawyer's eye

4.1 Machine-written summaries of press articles. A headline plus a link is well-established practice. A machine-written summary of the article's substance is a step beyond that, and it is the step the Wire takes. Two questions follow, and they have different answers:

• In the UK, whether the summary is a substantial reproduction of the article's expression, or an unprotected restatement of its facts. Facts are not protected; the way they are expressed is. Our summaries are re-expressed, which helps, but length and closeness matter.
• In the EU, the press publishers' right in Article 15 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 gives publishers a right over online use of press publications, with a carve-out only for hyperlinking and for "individual words or very short extracts". A paragraph-length summary is not obviously either. The UK did not implement the Directive, but the Wire is sold to EU readers, and the analysis follows the reader.

What reduces the risk: keeping summaries short; never being a substitute for the article; always linking; honouring takedown requests fast (see Copyright and Takedown); and, for the handful of publishers who matter most, a syndication conversation. That last one is a commercial move, not a legal one, and it turns the biggest risk into a relationship.

4.2 Yahoo Finance market data. Yahoo's terms restrict commercial redistribution of the data obtained through their interfaces. The Wire displays quotes and sparklines inside a product that is now sold. Options: a licensed market-data feed (there are inexpensive ones with clean redistribution terms), restricting market data to the free tier, or replacing it with an exchange-licensed source. [DECIDE: which of the three.]

4.3 Wikipedia share-alike. CC BY-SA is share-alike, so a derivative of Wikipedia text carries the same licence forward. Company one-liners drafted from Wikipedia are, on our view, new expression of unprotected facts rather than derivatives of the article's expression — but where a one-liner is close to the Wikipedia sentence, the share-alike argument is live. What reduces the risk: generate one-liners from the register's own structured fields rather than from encyclopedia prose wherever both exist, and keep the CC BY-SA attribution we already carry.

5. Attribution we give, and ask you to keep

On the Wire:

• Headlines and extracts: the publication is named and linked on every item.
• Market data: "Market data: Yahoo Finance", with a delay notice.
• Company facts: "Wikipedia / Wikidata (CC BY-SA)".
• Social: the author's handle, linked to the post.
• Registry facts: the registry named on the row.

If you quote the Wire, attribute it to "AXIOM Global Entertainment Wire" with a link where the medium allows, and keep any source attribution attached to what you quote. You must not strip attribution — clause 3.6 of the Acceptable Use Policy.

6. If you are a publisher or data owner

If your material appears in the Wire and you would like it changed, attributed differently, or removed, write to hello@axiom.vc and we will act on it quickly and without argument. The takedown route is in Copyright and Takedown. We would also rather talk about a licence than receive a letter — the Wire's whole purpose is to send readers to your reporting.

End of Sources, Attribution and Third-Party Rights.