Transparency

This page explains how Rent Regulations sources its content, what editorial principles govern the corpus, and who may use the data and under what license.

How we source content

Every regulation, statute, and definition on this site is drawn from one of the authoritative sources listed on /sources. These are exclusively U.S. federal and state government publications and Cornell University's Legal Information Institute (LII), which is a public-domain legal reference operated by Cornell Law School.

Operative legal language — the actual text of statutes and regulations — is quoted verbatim from the official source, with a citation identifying the exact provision (title, part, section, and paragraph). No operative language on this site has been paraphrased, summarized as if it were the rule itself, or adapted from a secondary commercial source.

Where we provide editorial summaries (e.g., plain-English explanations of what a provision means in practice), those summaries are clearly labeled as “Editorial summary:” and are never presented as the rule itself. The citation to the primary source always appears adjacent.

Source classification

Primary statutes: U.S. Code (via OLRC at uscode.house.gov), California Codes (via Leginfo)
Primary regulations: Code of Federal Regulations (via eCFR at ecfr.gov), Federal Register (at federalregister.gov)
Agency guidance: HUD.gov, HUD Exchange, CFPB, EPA.gov, ADA.gov — official agency publications and program handbooks
Secondary explanatory: Cornell LII — used for cross-linking and public-domain common-law definitions; operative language always sourced to the primary publication

What we never use

The following sources are explicitly excluded from the corpus, regardless of how widely cited they are elsewhere:

Black's Law Dictionary
Copyrighted commercial legal dictionary. Definitions may deviate from statutory text.
Nolo
Copyrighted secondary source. Plain-language summaries are not authoritative legal text.
FindLaw, Avvo, LegalZoom
Commercial secondary sources. Not authoritative for statutory interpretation.
Wikipedia
User-edited; not authoritative for legal definitions, which require verbatim statutory citation.
Real estate blogs, opinion pieces, generic content sites
Not authoritative. Content often paraphrases or misquotes statutes.
Paid databases (Westlaw, LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law)
We do not pay for someone else's compilation of public-domain law. All primary sources are freely available from government publishers.

Editorial principles

DEC-003: Verbatim operative language

Operative regulatory language is always quoted verbatim from the primary source, with a citation to the exact provision. Editorial summaries are clearly labeled “Editorial summary:” and are never presented as the rule itself.

Every claim is cited. If a statement about a regulation cannot be cited to a specific provision in a primary source, it does not appear in the corpus.

No silent fallbacks. If the database does not yet contain information for a given jurisdiction or rule, we render an empty state identifying the gap — never substitute content from a different jurisdiction as if it were applicable.

No stubs. A jurisdiction listed as “published” is complete to its declared depth. Incomplete jurisdictions remain in a “coming soon” state with a target date.

Update cadence

Each tracked source is checked for content changes using a cryptographic hash of the relevant document. When a hash changes, the change-detection pipeline fetches the updated text, diffs it against the prior version, and queues the affected provisions for re-ingestion and re-verification.

Change checks run daily for primary regulation sources (eCFR, Federal Register) and weekly for statutory sources. Agency guidance documents are checked when the underlying program publishes an update notice.

The public API exposes verification_event timestamps so consumers can determine when each provision was last verified against its source.

License

The Rent Regulations corpus — the structured database of provisions, citations, classifications, and glossary definitions — is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

The underlying U.S. federal and California government works quoted in the corpus are in the public domain (U.S. government works are not subject to copyright under 17 U.S.C. § 105; California government works are similarly in the public domain under California Government Code § 6254.9).

Derivative databases and applications built on this corpus must carry the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license and attribute “Rent Regulations (rentregulations.com)” as the source.

SPDX-License-Identifier:

CC-BY-SA-4.0

Reporting errors

If you identify an error — a provision cited incorrectly, a definition that does not match the source, or a change in law not yet reflected in the corpus — please report it at:

corrections@rentregulations.com

[Note: A formal corrections intake form is forthcoming. In the interim, email reports are reviewed within 3 business days.]

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