License terms

These terms apply to every Case Harvester license, paid or pro bono. They are short on purpose, so you can read all of them before you agree. Your access is granted under a data-use agreement that incorporates this page.

What you are licensed to do

You may query the licensed data, retrieve individual cases, and export filtered subsets, for the research or reporting purpose you described in your access request. You may publish findings, analyses, visualizations, and articles based on the data, including quoted figures and aggregate statistics. You do not need our permission to publish, and we claim no rights over what you produce.

The license is granted to you, or to your organization if you applied as one, for that stated purpose. Tokens identify a named person and may not be shared with anyone else. Everyone who will query the data needs their own.

What you may not do

• No screening. You may not use the data to evaluate a specific person for housing, employment, credit, insurance, admission, or any similar decision about that individual, and you may not supply it to anyone who will use it that way.
• No people-search. You may not build, sell, or feed a service whose purpose is to look up individuals by name, nor publish a searchable index of the records keyed to individuals.
• No redistribution. You may not republish the database, or a substantial part of it, as data. Publishing your findings is the point; republishing our database is not. If you need to share extracts to make research reproducible, ask us first. We would rather help you do it properly than find out afterwards.
• No resale. You may not sell, sublicense, or transfer your access, or use it to provide a data service to a third party.
• No re-identification. Unless your written project approval expressly grants unredacted structured-field access, you may not attempt to re-identify criminal defendants or eviction tenants, whether by matching the data against other sources or by any other means. An unredacted-records grant does not relax the prohibitions on screening, people-search, redistribution, or resale.
• No circumvention. You may not attempt to evade allowance accounting, redaction, or access controls.

Direct use, security, citation, and monitoring

You are the direct end user of the data. You may publish your findings, analysis, and conclusions. You may not provide the data, query results, or access as a service to a third party.

Use reasonable safeguards to keep tokens and downloaded data from unauthorized access. Limit access to authorized users. Tell [email protected] promptly if a token or downloaded data is exposed.

Cite Case Harvester in published work that uses the data. The documentation at caseharvester.org/docs/citing includes a citation guide.

Access and queries are logged for security and agreement enforcement. We keep those logs confidential for the length of the license plus one year. We monitor use and may suspend or end access if the agreement is broken.

Term

Licenses run for a fixed term, stated when your access is granted, and access ends when that term does. Each person on a license has their own row allowance, and all of them refresh on one rolling 30-day cycle. That cycle starts the day the first access link on the license is opened, not the day you paid. The term itself runs from the day we set your account up, so open your link promptly.

The allowance is a guardrail against bulk extraction, not a price. If you reach it in the middle of legitimate work, tell us and we will raise it. We would rather do that than have you ration your own research.

Records removed from Case Search

Cases and charges that Case Harvester collected before they disappeared from Case Search are included in the licensed data and marked.

Redacted structured fields

Structured party fields for criminal defendants and eviction tenants omit names, exact dates of birth, street addresses, and physical descriptors by default. Residential property addresses in bail-bond and judgment records are also omitted by default. A justified, project-scoped grant exposes every structured field withheld by the customer redaction policy until its required expiry. Fields used only to operate Case Harvester remain unavailable. Court-authored narrative text remains as published and can mention anyone. Paying more does not unlock the exception.

Accuracy

This is a research database collected from the Maryland Judiciary Case Search, not an official court record. It carries transcription gaps, upstream errors, and delays, and it is not certified for any legal purpose. Do not use it to make a determination about a person's rights, eligibility, or record. If accuracy matters for a specific case, go to the court.

Ending a license

You may stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or end access, without refund, if you break these terms or the personalized data-use agreement. We may suspend access while we ask you about it.

We will tell you why. If we get that wrong, tell us and we will fix it. This is here to stop misuse, not to trip people up.

Changes & contact

If these terms change, we will update this page and note the date, and material changes will not apply retroactively to a term already running. Questions: [email protected].

Last updated: September 20, 2026