One test, and every clause has to pass it.
This page is written for you, the person whose way of working it is, and it is the one to read if you have heard every pitch and trust none of them. Would this still be acceptable if the two sides swapped places? Where the answer is no, the clause is not in the agreement. The method is that one question, and it is the reason the two columns below are the same length.
Each protection, and the counterpart holding it up.
Read the first line first, because it is the one that matters most: you own your skill, always and forever. Nothing on this page takes it, buys it, moves it or learns it out of you. Read either column on its own and it is a list of demands. Read across, and each line is an exchange: what you are protected from on the left, what we are protected from on the right, and neither standing without the other.
| What protects you | What protects us |
|---|---|
| Your skill is yours forever. You keep working, teaching and competing. | The tool we build is ours. It runs under your name and on your licence, and you cannot take the finished article to somebody else and sell it. |
| Ending it is free. No penalty, no clawback, no fee for walking away. | The job you are running finishes. Nothing new starts under it after the day notice arrives. |
| You are told the truth about erasing, backups included, with the real completion date. | One clear record of what was agreed, so nobody argues later about what was said. |
| You see the count and what you are owed. | We pay on real, checked hours and not on an estimate. |
| You are paid half of every hour, at a ceiling we published before you asked. | We keep the other half and carry every cost. Nothing is taken from your half for the building, the checking, the counting or the deleting. |
| Nothing goes anywhere without your yes. | No passing it on. Whoever licenses it cannot pass it to anybody else. |
| Nobody borrows your work quietly. A way of working taught on one owner's machine stays with that owner. | It runs only where it is licensed. Whoever licenses it runs it on the job it was licensed for, and nowhere else. |
| You are told what it can and cannot do, in the same words we use with the person paying for it. | What you record is real. You working the way you actually work, on the job you actually did, and not a performance for the recorder. |
The rest of this page takes the table apart: why it is built in pairs, how to run the test on any clause, and the test worked on the clauses you are most likely to press on. Then what a line with nothing across from it would look like, and the column on the right taken on its own, because it is the part people expect to be small print.
A protection with no counterpart is a favour, and favours get taken back.
You have signed paper before that read well on the day and was worth nothing on the day it was needed. Every line on the left has a line on the right holding it up. That is deliberate. An arrangement where one side is being generous lasts exactly as long as the generosity does: until money is tight, or the people change, or somebody buys us.
An arrangement where both sides need the other's protection to keep their own is an arrangement that survives all three.
These are the points the agreements are being built around. Nobody signs anything before they are finished and on this site.
Every line on the left has a line on the right holding it up.
Read either column on its own and it is a list of demands. Read across, and each line is an exchange.
Each clause, both ways round.
The clauses you are most likely to press on, written as they stand and then read from our side of the table. Where the swapped reading is still acceptable, the clause is in. Every one below is in, and the reading shows why. A clause that passes reads the same from both chairs. A clause that fails reads as generosity from one chair and as a demand from the other.
You can end it, and ending it is free.
Give notice and nothing new starts under it. One running job is not pulled out from under a crew, and that is the one thing the clause asks of you. No penalty, no clawback, no fee for walking away. You are told the true deletion date, backups included.
In your seat we would want the same, and we would accept the same delay.
If it were our record in your keeping, we would want to take it back on our own say and pay nothing to do it. We would want the real date for erasing and not the convenient one. And we would accept that a machine mid-pass is not stopped for a letter, because stopping a machine mid-pass is its own hazard. So the clause gives you the right to walk for free, and asks of you the one thing we would accept in your place: the job already running finishes.
You see the count and what you are owed.
The count is kept in sessions, and each one carries its own identifier and signature. You see the hours it worked and what you are owed, and you can check both against the record that shows who cleared the work. The count is kept in one record that both sides read, so you get an accounting and a right to audit it.
Paid on somebody else's count, we would not take a total on trust.
If we were the ones paid by the hour on a count somebody else kept, we would want to read the record it came from and not a summary of it, and we would want the hours written where they cannot be moved without moving the name of the person who cleared the work. If we were the ones paying, we would want to pay on hours that were checked and not on an estimate. The clause gives you the first and asks the second of you: the hours you are paid for are the hours on the record, and not a figure either side arrived at some other way.
Your name on it, and nothing under a house name; no number takes the place of yours.
A job that runs your way says whose way it is. The name is the point, and it stays attached to you. A person on the crew chooses whose way of working runs by name, because a name is what was asked for and a name is what appears on the record.
We would not let our work run under another name, so yours does not either.
If it were our way of working, we would want the record to say whose it was every time it ran, and we would call anything else taking. The name serves our side as well. A way of working with a name on it can be asked for, chosen, counted and paid, and one without a name could be none of those. What the clause asks of you is that the name means what it says: a way of working runs under the name it was recorded under, on the job it was licensed for, and whoever licenses it cannot pass it on under theirs.
Asked for on its own, in plain words, and never folded into another yes.
A record used to train a model rather than to run a machine is a different thing, and it has its own agreement. It is asked for on its own, in plain words, never folded into another yes, and the limit is stated before you agree: a model cannot be un-trained, so a withdrawal of it means nothing new runs from the day your notice arrives and the material comes out at the next revision of the model, with that date stated first.
Told before, not after, is what we would demand in your seat.
If we were asked for a yes that covered something the other three do not, we would want it put to us on its own, in words we could read at a kitchen table, and we would refuse to have it slipped inside a yes to something else. We would also want to be told what taking it back could and could not do before we answered rather than after. So it is asked on its own, and the limit is stated before you decide. What the clause asks of you is only that a separate question gets a separate answer.
The same reading can be run on every line of the table and on every clause of the covenant. None of them is exempt, and none of them is in because it favours us.
What a favour looks like, and why we do not write them.
A favour is a protection with nothing across from it. It costs the giver nothing to write and nothing to withdraw, and it reads well right up until the day you need it.
Written in one voice.
A favour speaks for the side that gives it: we will, we intend, we would never. There is no line for what happens if we do not. A term has that line, and the other side holds it.
Costs the giver nothing.
Nothing on the giver's side depends on it, so nothing on the giver's side defends it. When money is tight, or the people change, or somebody buys us, a favour goes first, because nobody on our side loses anything when it does.
Ends with the people who gave it.
You agreed to terms offered by particular people. A favour lasts as long as those people and their goodwill. A counterpart lasts as long as the arrangement, because taking it away costs the side that takes it.
So these do not go in, however well they would read on a page like this one.
- A right that costs money to use.
- A count only one side can read.
- A yes buried inside a different yes.
- A protection that travels with whoever is paying, rather than with the person in the seat.
- A promise that depends on who owns us next.
- A clause that needs a lawyer to explain what it does to you.
That is not generosity. It is the arrangement we would need in your position, and we would not accept a different one in ours.
The covenant, clause three
The protections on your side are held up by ours, and not by our goodwill. The awkward part of building it that way is that it makes us ask things of you, and the next section says what.
The tool we build is ours to keep, and you cannot take it and sell it.
The column on the right is the part people expect to be small print. It is neither small nor hidden, and none of it reaches your skill. Each line is what we need in order to keep paying you, and each one has been read with the names swapped.
- 01What is made of your skill is oursYour skill stays yours, always and forever, and what is made of it is Even Steven's and nobody else's: the recording of the day, the paper it is turned into, and the tool a machine runs. From that record we build a tool: it runs under your name, on your licence, it pays you every hour, and you can end it. After you it goes on paying your family for as long as the licence runs, which is the position the agreement is being built to, with counsel writing the words. We make the tool, and the tool is ours, the way the party who paid to make a recording keeps the recording and never the song. The shape is set out on what it is. You cannot take the finished article to somebody else and sell it.
- 02The job already running finishesNotice stops anything new from starting under it. It does not stop a machine mid-pass, because stopping a machine mid-pass is its own hazard. It is the one thing we ask of you on the day you walk.
- 03One clear record of what was agreedWhat was agreed is written down once, with names on it, so nobody argues later about what was said. We need it as much as you do. The record that shows what was agreed is the record that shows what we owe.
- 04No passing it on, and it runs only where it is licensedWhoever licenses your way of working runs it on the job it was licensed for and nowhere else, and cannot pass it to anybody else. That protects us, and it protects your right to end it, because a licence that could be passed on could not be taken back, and a promise that you can end it would then be empty.
- 05What you record is realYou working the way you work, on the job you did, and not a performance for the recorder. Nobody here judges that, because nothing in the checks looks at how you worked. It is a thing we ask of you, not a thing we test you on. What we need is the day as it was, because a way of working built from a show would fail on the ground, and it would fail under your name.
The same shape holds wherever a skill set comes from. Even Steven owns what is made of a skill on every track the Tacit Tessera register carries: Hands, which is a person's hands on a machine and is what this site describes; Machine, which is a way of working taught to or loaded on a machine; and Records, which is a professional's own practice or a company's own records. Whichever track it is, the person or company signs with Even Steven, and the skill itself stays theirs.
And the things we do not ask, because we would not accept being asked for them.
- We never ask for the technique. It stays in your own career, whatever the paper says.
- We never ask you to stop working, teaching, bringing on apprentices, or going somewhere else tomorrow.
- We never ask for a yes to one thing inside a yes to another.
- We never ask you to take a total on trust.
Would it still be acceptable if the two sides swapped places?
Every clause is written against its counterpart, and that is the test each one has to pass.
The usual arrangement has one column.
Most paper a person is asked to sign about a recording of their work protects the party that wrote it. There is a column of what they may do and a line for your signature. Ours has a second column, and it is the same length as the first.
Most of what is called AI was built with no columns at all. It learned from people who were never asked and never paid, and they found out afterwards, if they found out. If you think that is what is being offered here, you are right to think it, and you are right not to trust it. The people who wrote this run machines and are old enough to distrust it too. So here you are asked one agreement at a time, once for each thing, and the one that has no terms on it yet is not asked for at all. You are paid every hour. Your name is on it. You can end it. And your skill stays yours forever. Those are the lines in the second column, and they are the reason it exists. The machines are learning. Even Steven keeps it fair and square.
None of that is generosity, and none of it is new. The recorded-music shape is old, and it holds because the writer kept the song. Every attempt to pay people for what they know has either failed or dropped the paying part, and the two columns above are what it takes to keep the paying part in.
Why it is different, in fullWorked out on the family's own crews before it is offered to you.
The people writing the column on the right sit in the seat the column on the left is written for.
The agreements are being written now, with the crews of the family, on home ground. The people who sat down to write this are working it out on themselves first, so the awkward questions are found here and not by you.
The two columns can be the same length because the people writing the asks are the people who will be under the protections. An ask we would not accept from ourselves does not get written down, and a protection we would not want for ourselves does not get promised to you.
The test, read from four seats.
The column on the right protects you as much as us. What you license runs on the job it was licensed for and nowhere else, under the name it was licensed under, and the hours you are charged for are the hours the person is paid for, on one record. Nothing on the left is a courtesy you are asked to carry.
Read the column on the right as closely as the left. Nothing in it reaches your skill, which stays yours whatever the paper says. Each line there names something we need in order to keep paying you, and each one has been read with the names swapped. If a line reads as a demand you would not make in our place, tell us which one.
This page is not a legal opinion and the table is not the agreement. The agreements are being written now, and when the terms are settled they go on the covenant page in plain words, before anyone is asked to sign. The test is the rule they are written to, and you are welcome to run it on every clause.
The covenantShow us the favour.
If you can see a favour where we see a counterpart, we want to hear it.