Every session is accepted or refused, and a refusal names its reason.
Admission is the step between a recording and a registry entry. Nothing is admitted silently and nothing is admitted retrospectively. A session that does not pass is refused, the reason is named, the person who made it is told, and it goes no further.
What is read, and when it is read.
Admission reads what the session carries inside itself. It does not consult a register kept beside the record, because there is no register beside the record.
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01
Permission was live when the record was made Consent is read at the moment of recording, not looked up afterwards. The permissions that count are the ones that were live when the sitting happened, and they travel inside the session. A permission given later does not reach back over a session already made.
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02
The seal is intact A session is sealed when it is made, and a digest of its contents travels with it. Admission checks the one against the other. A record that has been touched since it was sealed does not pass, whatever it contains and whoever touched it.
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03
It is one person, one sitting, one family of machine A record that cannot be resolved to a single named operator is refused. A per-person count and a per-person withdrawal cannot be honoured over a record that belongs to more than one person, so a record like that is not admitted and then managed — it is not admitted.
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04
The name inside is the name the entry runs under The name carried in the record is the name the registry entry is held under and the name the licence will run under. A record made under one name does not go into an entry held under another, and an entry does not acquire contributors it was not opened for.
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05
Nothing in it falls outside what was permitted Four permissions are given separately and ended separately: to be recorded; to be held alongside others; to run under their own name; to be used to train a model. Admission reads which of the four were live at the moment of recording and admits the record only for the uses they cover. The four consents
Consent is read once, at the moment of recording.
The timing is the rule. Nearly everything that can be argued about consent can be argued about when it was read.
A consent looked up after the fact is a consent read at a moment nobody agreed to. If permission is fetched from a register when a record is used rather than when it was made, then an edit to the register changes the character of a recording that already exists — backwards, and without the person being in the room. We do not work that way. The permissions that govern a session are the permissions that were live when the sitting happened, they travel inside the session, and nothing later moves them.
The rule runs in both directions, and the second direction is the one that costs us something. A permission given afterwards does not reach back over a session already made. A recording taken before a person agreed to something is not rescued by their agreeing to it later: it is refused, and it stays refused, even where everyone involved would now be content for it to be used. That is the cost of a gate that cannot be opened from behind, and it is worth paying, because a gate that can be opened from behind is not a gate.
Why the paper sits outside the employment relationship
Employees can only give free consent in exceptional circumstances, when it will have no adverse consequences at all whether or not they give consent.
EDPB Guidelines 05/2020, paragraphs 21 to 23
That is the objection a competent counsel raises first, and it is a good one. It is also exactly why we do not contract with the person in the seat. The person signs with Even Steven — not with their employer, and not with us — in their own seat, on their own machine, on their own time. Even Steven is their counterparty and the holder of their consent. Tacit Source holds a licence from Even Steven and markets under it, and no part of the person's agreement runs to the party that licenses the work commercially.
The answer to a consent objection has to be structural. A reassurance is not an answer, and a policy a company states it will follow is a reassurance.
One way in, two ways out.
There is no third exit. A session is not parked, not held pending, and not admitted provisionally while somebody decides.
Fig. 1 — One way in, two ways out. The sealed session carries a mark; the dashed rule is a boundary nothing crosses.
A refusal names its reason, and the person is told.
A silent refusal and a silent admission are the same failure: a record whose standing nobody can account for afterwards.
The reason is named
A refusal carries the reason it was refused, in the terms of the check that refused it. Not "ineligible". Not a code with no words behind it. The check that failed is the reason given, and it is given in language the person who made the record can read.
The person is told
The person who made the record is told that it was refused and why. They do not have to ask for it, they do not have to find it on a statement, and they are not told at the end of a period. A refusal that the person only discovers by looking is not a refusal they were told about.
It is not held against anyone
A refused session is not a mark against the person who made it. It does not change what they are paid for hours already counted, it does not affect whether later sessions are admitted, and it is not reported to anyone as a fact about them. A refusal is a fact about a record.
A refused session does not enter the registry and does not contribute to any entry. What is kept is the refusal itself — what was refused, when, and on which check — because a corpus whose refusals cannot be accounted for is a corpus whose contents cannot be accounted for either. That is a record about a decision, not about a person, and it is read in an audit of the gate, never in a judgment of the operator.
Admission is a check on a record, not an assessment of a person. It does not rank operators, it does not score work, and its outcome is never supplied to an employer, an insurer or anyone else. A record is never supplied to assess the person.
Admission is what makes everything downstream licensable.
A licensee's counsel does not ask whether a corpus is good. They ask whether it can contain something nobody agreed to.
That question has one honest answer, and the answer is structural rather than editorial. If consent is read at the moment of recording, and a record that fails the read is refused with its reason named, then what is in the registry is exactly what passed a check at the time it was made. There is no back door, because there is no later moment at which something can be let in. A permission given afterwards does not reach back, so there is nothing for a back door to do.
Everything after this step leans on it. The registry holds entries by name, one person at a time. A release carries one named entry to a machine and carries nothing else. A count line attributes an hour to a person, and that hour is paid to them. Each of those is a claim about a named human being, and each is worth precisely what the check that put that person's work into the registry is worth.
This is also why the shape cannot be retrofitted. Separability is not a feature of the product; it is the condition on which every other promise here can be kept, and admission is where the condition is first imposed. A corpus assembled by taking in what was convenient and sorting it out later cannot be made separable afterwards, and a right of withdrawal offered over such a corpus is a right to something nobody is in a position to address.
Counsel asking what the corpus can contain?
The answer is this page, and it is the same answer to every party. The licence sets the terms the answer is given under.