Three things, and two owners.
You own your skill, always and forever. The record of you working is ours, made of your skill and held for you. What we build from it is a tool that runs under your name. Keeping those three apart is what lets the first one stay untouched, so here they are, apart.
Your technique, your recording, and the tool we build from it.
Each one has an owner, and each one answers differently on the day a withdrawal arrives. Read the table across and the deal is in it.
| The thing | Whose it is | What a withdrawal does to it |
|---|---|---|
| The technique In your own hands and your own career | Yours, and not for sale. We never ask to acquire it and we would not take it | Nothing. It is untouched, always |
| The recording of you working | Information about you, so it is yours to allow and yours to withdraw. Even Steven owns it, for you | What we hold is deleted on dates you are told. Where it has gone into a model, that material comes out at the model's next revision, on the date you were told before you agreed, and nobody here will tell you a model has forgotten you |
| What we build from it The thing that actually runs | A tool. Even Steven owns it, for you, and it runs under your name, on your licence, and pays you every hour | Nothing new starts under it, the job already running finishes, and then it is out of service, because the licence under it is gone |
Of the three, one moves, and it moves only for the uses you said yes to: the recording, and for no others. Your technique never moves. The tool never leaves us. It runs under your name, on your licence, it pays you every hour, and you can end it. After you, the licence, the money and the right to end it pass to your estate for as long as the licence runs. That position is ruled, and counsel is writing the clause. We make the tool. You own the skill. It is licensed to an owner for a job, by name, and it cannot be passed on.
Most of what is called AI learns from people who were never asked and never paid, and if that is what you think is going on here, you have earned the doubt. Nothing here learns a thing from you without a yes you gave on its own, you are paid for every hour the tool runs, your name is on it, and you can end it.
Privacy law and the agreement.
You own your skill, always and forever. No paper gives you that and no paper can take it: a way of working lives in the person, and nothing here tries to move it. What a paper can give you is a right you can hold somebody to, and this is where each of yours comes from.
You will hear other people tell operators that their technique is intellectual property. It is not, and a person who believes it will make decisions on a footing that does not hold. Copyright protects expression rather than method, and a way of cutting a slope or bringing a process back into band is not an authored work.
What is real is this: the recording is information about an identifiable person. Privacy law attaches consent and withdrawal rights to that directly, and it does so in most of the places this could ever operate, because privacy law across the world has converged on the same shape. The entitlement to be paid is created by the agreement itself.
A right you actually have is worth more than a bigger one somebody told you about.
- Privacy law gives you
- Consent and withdrawalAttached to information about you directly, and to you rather than to whoever arranged the recording
- The agreement gives you
- Payment, the name, the count and the true datesCreated by the paper you sign, and written against a counterpart on our side
- Neither gives you
- A title to your techniqueThe law protects a thing that was made, never a way of making it. You keep your technique by keeping it, as you always have
So what is built here is a payment obligation and a licence, and not a claim to own anything. A licence and a payment are things a person can hold us to. A title to a way of working is a thing nobody can give you, and a person who is sold one has been sold a footing that will not hold when they lean on it.
You license the record. You keep the skill.
Nothing here takes a technique out of a person's hands, and nothing here could.
What you keep, what we hold, and what an owner gets.
The same three things, read from each seat. Nothing on one side is missing from another, and nothing on any side is a favour.
The technique, the name, and every way out.
Your technique, in your own career. Nothing here stops you working, teaching, bringing on apprentices, or going somewhere else tomorrow. Your name on every job that runs your way. A yes to each agreement on its own, and a no that is honoured without emptying anything else. The right to end it, free, and to be told the true dates. The count, session by session, and what you are owed against it.
What is made of your skill: the recording, the paper and the tool.
The recording of how you work, used for what you said yes to and no others. The paper it is turned into, and the tool built from it, which runs under your name and which you can end. Every one of them carries your name and pays you every hour it is in use. The duty to account for the count, which is kept in the Tacit Tessera register and read by both sides, and the money, which is owed by us. And your withdrawal, when it comes, kept on file, because a record that deletes its own withdrawals cannot show it honoured one.
A way of working by name, for one job, and nothing to keep.
A way of working licensed under your name for the job it was licensed for, and nowhere else. A person on their own crew still chooses it by name and still says go. The same count you see, on the same record, and it is what they are charged for. Nothing they can pass on, sell, or hold on to after the licence under it is gone.
Putting an entry in the Tacit Tessera register does not hand over the material it was made from. The recording stays here, held by Even Steven for the person it is about. The register holds the entry, the number beside the name and the count, it licenses the entry, and it never holds a person's consent, never ends a licence and never asks anybody to sign anything.
A way of working you taught your employer's machine stays with that employer. It going anywhere else takes a fresh agreement, signed by you. It is still counted, still paid and still yours to end. Your protections travel with you, not with whoever is paying.
A recording of you working cannot be made anonymous without taking the skill out of it.
The session is the raw record of a person working: what their hands did, what the machine did back, and what they were looking at when they acted. Every part of that is you.
Take the name off it and it is still you.
A session identifies the person in the seat by design, because a way of working with no name on it could not be licensed, credited or paid for. But the name is not what makes it yours. How you come into the ground, how you carry a load over soft ground, how long you wait before you commit to a cut: the way of working is the identifying part, and it is there whether or not the name is. Strip it out to hide who it was and there is nothing left worth licensing.
So we do not call the record anonymous, because it is not, and nothing here is built on the idea that it could be. It is information about you, and the rights that attach to that kind of information are yours and not your employer's: to be told before it starts, to agree separately, to see what is held, and to withdraw at will. It is yours to allow and yours to withdraw.
An instrument that bought your technique would have nothing left to pay you for.
There is nothing there to acquire. The technique stays in your hands and your career whatever the paper says, and an instrument that took it outright would extinguish the reason to keep paying you.
The covenant, clause four
You are paid because you kept the original. A buyout takes the original, and with it goes every hour after the day of the sale, the name on the work, and the way out. What is left is a lump sum, and a lump sum is the last money you see.
The hours
A share for every hour your way of working is in use, for as long as it is. Sell the technique and the hours belong to whoever bought it, from that day on.
The name
A bought technique carries no name at all, and the person it came from is nowhere on it.
The way out
You cannot withdraw what you have sold. A licence ends on notice, free, with the dates told to you. A sale ends nothing.
We never buy it, and the whole is never sold flat. And if this company ever changes hands, that should be a reason to withdraw, on its own. It is one of the points the agreement is being built around.
We never buy it, and the whole is never sold flat.
You are paid because you kept the original.
We do not give legal opinions, and you should not accept one from a vendor.
Whether a recording arrangement affects your employment agreement, your obligations to an employer, or your position under a collective agreement is for your own counsel or your own representative. We will not offer a view on it, and anyone selling you something who does is telling you what suits them.
What we can show you is how the thing works: what is recorded, what is not, where it is kept, who can reach it, and what happens when you say stop.
Where the place you work gives a works council, a union or another body a say in whether recording happens at all, the instrument is built to take that second signature rather than to work around it.
Where a body has a say in whether recording happens, it signs too.
Your yes comes first and nobody gives it for you. In some of the places people work, a body speaks for the crew as well, and the instrument is written to take its signature rather than to go looking for a way round it.
- 01Yours, firstEach agreement on its own: to be recorded at all, to be combined with others, to run under your name, to be used to train a model. A no to any one of them is honoured without emptying the others, and nobody signs one on your behalf. The fourth is asked for on its own, in plain words, never folded into another yes, and the limit on taking it back is stated before you agree.
- 02The body's, secondWhere a works council, a union or another body has a say in whether recording happens at all, that say is taken as a signature of its own. It sits beside yours. It does not replace yours, and yours does not replace it.
- 03Nobody's, in place of eitherOnly you can agree to one. A consent folded into an equipment contract, a notice on a board, or a signature from the person who arranged the recording is not a consent from you, and none of those is taken as one.
A recording made over the objection of the people it is about is the kind that gets stopped, and deserves to be. A recording with every signature it needs on it is the kind a person can stand beside years later. The second signature is asked for at the start, and it is what lets the record stand.
Three things, four readers.
What you license by name is licensed for your job and nowhere else, and you cannot pass it on. What your own operator teaches your own machine stays yours and goes nowhere else. You see the same count the person is paid on, and it is what you are charged for.
Your skill is yours, always, and we never ask for it. What is made of it is Even Steven's, for you: the recording, the paper and the tool. Each carries your name and pays you every hour it is in use. The recording is information about you, so its use is yours to allow and yours to withdraw, and the tool goes out of service when the licence under it is gone. Even Steven administers your rights under all of this and nobody else does, and it is the one house you sign with, on every track.
Whose a record is has no bearing on who clears a job.
This is built as a licence and a payment obligation, not a claim to own anything. Consent and withdrawal attach to the person in the seat under privacy law. Payment, the name and the count come from the agreement, and the agreements are being written now. We give no opinion on how any of it touches your contracts.
Ask whose a record of yours would be.
If you want to know what a record of yours would be, and whose, write to us.