Legal & compliance
Every record Permit Press distributes is already public: it comes from a government portal any member of the public can query directly. Normalizing it into one searchable feed does not change what lawful uses of that data are, but it does make misuse easier to do at scale, so this page states plainly what each record stream is and is not cleared for. It grows one section per record domain as each is added to the platform.
Deed transfers, Notices of Commencement, and construction liens and their releases are read from a county Clerk of Court's Official Records search (currently Lee County's Landmark Web portal), the same public index the clerk itself publishes for anyone to search by name, document type, or date range. Permit Press republishes the fields that index carries: parties (grantor/grantee on a deed; owner/contractor on a Notice of Commencement), the recording date, the consideration or documentary stamp amount where the index carries one, and the legal description and parcel identifier, unedited from what the clerk indexes. See the adapter's own notes (worker/src/adapters/landmark-lee-clerk.ts) for exactly which fields come from the index versus are left blank because the index does not carry them.
Marketing and lead generation: identifying and contacting prospects such as a new homeowner in their first weeks of ownership, a general contractor with an active job on file, or a supplier tracking a lien to preserve its own rights. This is the intended use of this feed, and the one docs/EXPANSION-FEEDS.md builds it for.
Using this data, alone or combined with any other data, as a factor in deciding a consumer's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or housing or tenancy is prohibited. That is an eligibility determination under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (15 U.S.C. § 1681 et seq.); Permit Press is not a consumer reporting agency, this feed is not assembled or maintained to FCRA accuracy and dispute standards, and using it for an FCRA-covered purpose exposes the subscriber who makes that decision, not only Permit Press, to liability. Concretely: do not use a deed to help decide whether to extend credit or approve a lease application; do not use a lien to help decide whether to deny one.
Recorded instruments can be provisional and not yet verified by the clerk's own indexing (the clerk flags these distinctly; this feed preserves that flag as the record's raw status rather than resolving it), amended, or later found defective. Adapters never diff or interpret a record: they report what the portal currently shows, untouched, in raw_json. Permit Press takes no position on a document's legal effect and this feed is not a substitute for a title search.
Court case records are read from a county Clerk of Court's own public case search (currently the Charlotte County Clerk's Benchmark portal), through a registered account the clerk itself offers, and only from the public index: case number, case type, style, indexed parties, status, filing date, and the docket entry list. Permit Press does not access or republish document images, and it does not search the case categories Florida's court records access framework restricts from general public view (guardianship, mental health, juvenile, family). Some probate index fields are themselves limited for public access levels; whatever the clerk withholds from the account's access level simply never enters the feed.
A large share of this feed's audience is lawyers, and a new filing is a lawful reason to offer representation, but every written solicitation a subscriber sends based on these records must comply with the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar on direct contact with prospective clients (Rule 4-7.18(b)): the marking, content, and record keeping requirements, the ban on soliciting anyone who has told you not to, and every applicable waiting period, including the 30 day bar on written solicitations concerning a personal injury or wrongful death matter, which civil case data can surface. Telephone and in person solicitation of accident victims is prohibited outright. The waiting periods restrict the outreach, not the feed: Permit Press may tell you the case exists the day it is filed; when you may send the letter is your bar rules' question, and out of state subscribers answer to their own state's versions of these rules. Non-lawyers marketing foreclosure "rescue" or mortgage relief services to the homeowners in this feed are covered by the federal MARS rule (Regulation O, 12 C.F.R. Part 1015) and Fla. Stat. § 501.1377; both restrict claims and up front fees.
Using eviction case data from this feed, alone or combined with any other data, to decide whether to rent to someone, or as any factor in a decision about a consumer's eligibility for housing, credit, insurance, or employment, is prohibited. These are consumer report uses under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (15 U.S.C. § 1681 et seq.); Permit Press is not a consumer reporting agency, this feed carries none of FCRA's accuracy, currency, or dispute protections (a dismissed eviction looks like a filed one in a raw index), and a subscriber who screens tenants with it takes on CRA-grade liability personally. This prohibition is a term of service: subscribers found using court case data for tenant screening or any other FCRA covered eligibility purpose lose access. The lawful audience for eviction data is the other side of the docket: landlord-tenant attorneys, property managers tracking their own portfolios, and turnover service crews.
A docket entry is the clerk's one line index of a filing, not the filing itself, and this feed reproduces it untouched (the full entry list rides in each record's raw_json). Cases are reported as the portal shows them, which can lag the courtroom; nothing here is legal advice, notice of any deadline, or a substitute for the court file.
New corporate registrations, amendments, name changes, registered agent changes, dissolutions, and withdrawals are read from the bulk data files the Florida Department of State's Division of Corporations publishes for free public download, using the anonymous credentials the Division itself publishes on its Data Downloads page. Nothing here is scraped from behind a login, and nothing is bought from a data broker. These are the same files any member of the public may download, and the Division states that they are provided for informational purposes.
Coverage is statewide because the source is. The feed defaults to the five Southwest Florida counties, derived per record from the entity's own principal address; every other Florida county is one filter change away.
Marketing and business development. A new registration is the clearest buying signal in B2B — the company needs insurance, banking, payroll, signage, an accountant, a lawyer, premises, and a dozen services besides — and reaching out to a newly registered business is ordinary commerce. Ranking registered agents and formation filers by volume, as the agent register does, is competitive research on professional firms in their professional capacity.
No credit, insurance underwriting, or employment decisions. A dissolution or an administrative dissolution for a missed annual report says something unflattering about a company, and using this feed to decide whether to extend credit to, insure, or employ anyone turns it into a consumer report and pulls the user under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. This feed is not an FCRA-compliant source and is not licensed for those uses.
Registered agents and officers are people. A large share of Florida registrations name an individual, at a home address, as the registered agent — the file publishes that address because the state requires a physical one for service of process, not as an invitation. Use the register to understand who does this work professionally; do not use it to build dossiers on individuals, and do not treat a home address as a business address for door-to-door or bulk mail.
No impersonation of the state. Florida registrants are a well-known target for solicitations designed to look like official annual report or certificate notices. Nothing derived from this feed may imitate correspondence from the Division of Corporations or any other agency.
The Division publishes one file per work day, so a registration appears here a day after it is filed and no sooner. Annual reports and address changes are explicitly excluded from the event files, so a company whose only recent activity was an annual report will look quiet here even though it is current with the state. Adapters never diff or interpret a record: they report what the file currently contains, untouched, in raw_json. Permit Press takes no position on any entity's standing, and this feed is not a substitute for a certificate of status from the Division.
Food service licences and their inspection results come from the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation's Division of Hotels and Restaurants; retail beverage licences and the applications and transfers moving them come from the same department's Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco. Both are read from the downloadable data files DBPR itself publishes for anyone to take, not scraped from a search screen, and both are republished here with the fields those files carry: the licensee, the establishment name, the licensed location, the licence type and status, and for a kitchen the date, result, and violation counts of its most recent inspection. See the adapters' own notes (worker/src/adapters/dbpr-food-service.ts and dbpr-abt-liquor.ts) for exactly which fields come from which file and which are left blank because DBPR does not publish them.
Marketing and lead generation: identifying and contacting a business that has just been licensed, has changed hands, or has an operating problem worth solving. This is what the feed is built for, and the audience docs/EXPANSION-FEEDS.md builds it for is other businesses, food distributors, equipment and point-of-sale vendors, pest control and hood cleaning services, insurers, and brokers, selling to a business rather than to a consumer.
DBPR states plainly that each inspection report reflects the conditions present at the time of that inspection. This feed preserves that: it carries the division's own disposition text untouched, and it moves on. A restaurant ordered closed under an emergency order that then passes its callback inspection is shown as open again, not as permanently flagged, because that is what the data says. Do not republish an inspection result as a current statement about an establishment, and do not present a violation count as a food safety rating: DBPR does not issue one, and violations differ in severity in ways a single number does not carry.
Using this data, alone or combined with any other data, as a factor in deciding a consumer's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or housing or tenancy is prohibited, for the same Fair Credit Reporting Act reasons set out for recorded documents above. Separately, do not use it to harass, disparage, or extort a licensed business, and do not use a licensee's name or address to contact an individual for a consumer purpose: a licensee is often a natural person, and a mailing address on a licence is often a home.
DBPR refreshes these files on its own schedule, and a licence can change hands, lapse, or be inspected between one refresh and the next. Where the department publishes two rows for one licence because it is mid-transfer, this feed resolves them to a single record and keeps both in raw_json rather than discarding one. Adapters never diff or interpret: they report what the published file currently shows. Permit Press takes no position on a licence's validity, and this feed is not a substitute for verifying a licence with the department.
A signal is not a new public record: it is two records this platform already carries (or one, for an absence pattern), joined because they sit on the same property, with the rule that joined them stated on its face (a deed transfer followed by a permit; a code enforcement case with no permit pulled since; a Notice of Commencement beside a permit). Every constituent record is linked from the signal, and each remains governed by its own feed's section on this page.
A signal inherits the strictest terms of its constituent feeds. Marketing and lead generation remain the intended use. The Fair Credit Reporting Act line drawn for recorded documents above applies with extra force here: combining records about one property or person into a composite is exactly the kind of assembly the FCRA regulates when it is used for eligibility decisions, so never use a signal, or the fact that one exists, as a factor in credit, insurance, employment, or tenancy decisions. For signals built on a code enforcement case, keep outreach lead-gen and tone-appropriate: a violation notice is a stressful document to receive, and marketing to its recipient is lawful but reflects on every subscriber of this platform.
The join behind a signal is the county parcel identifier where one is resolved, and a conservatively normalized street address where one is not (the signal says which on its face). Either can misattribute in edge cases the platform cannot see, and the pattern itself is circumstantial: a deed followed by a permit is usually a new owner renovating, not always. Verify against the linked source records before acting on one.