A chain, not a badge.
Every hour a machine runs under licence traces back to a named skill, a named person, a consent that was live when the record was made, and an admission that accepted it. That chain is what provenance means here. It is walkable in both directions, by a party that is neither us nor the person.
Four objects, each naming the next.
An hour booked against a licence is not a bare number. Four objects stand behind it, and each one names the one before it. Take any of the four away and the hour is unaccounted for.
- 01A named skillOne person's way of running one family of machine, held in the registry under its own name and addressed by that name. A machine runs one at a time, chosen deliberately before the work starts. There is no default and no last-used: a machine carrying yesterday's choice forward would be running on nobody's authority.
- 02A named personThe skill came from someone. The name the licence runs under travels on the release and appears on the count row. The hour that is invoiced and the hour that is paid are the same signed row, so attribution and payment cannot come apart.
- 03A consent that was livePermission is read at the moment of recording, and it travels inside the session rather than in a register beside it. A record whose permission was not live when it was made does not pass admission, and a consent given afterwards does not reach back over a session already made.
- 04An admission that accepted itEvery session is accepted or refused, and a refusal names its reason. Nothing is admitted silently and nothing is admitted retrospectively. The decision, and its date, stand behind the registry entry for as long as the entry exists.
The four are held in that order because that is the order in which they were made. Provenance here is not assembled afterwards out of whatever happens to be on file. It is the file.
What a licensee puts in front of a third party.
A licensee holds a machine, a job and an invoice. What it can show about where the skill on that machine came from is a short and exact list, and the shortness is the design.
Enough to walk the chain
- The name the licence runs under.
- The identity of the release the machine holds, and a digest of what went into it.
- The date it was built, and the named person who signed for it.
- The registry entry it was built from, by name.
- The admission decision standing behind that entry, and the date of that decision.
- The signed rows the machine produced while it ran.
Never on a machine
- The sessions themselves. A machine never receives a session.
- Any part of a recording.
- Anything identifying the person beyond the name the licence runs under.
- The contents of what went into the release. A digest of the contents crosses; the contents never do.
A digest is a fingerprint of the contents. It lets a party satisfy itself years later that the package in front of it is the package that was signed for, without the contents having crossed at any point. That is the whole of what a machine holds about how a way of working was made, and it is enough to walk the chain back.
A released package is also fixed. Anything different arriving on that machine is a different release, with its own identity, its own digest and its own signature, put there by a person who signed for it.
A record is never supplied to assess the person, to an insurer or to anyone else. Provenance answers where a way of working came from. It answers nothing about how anybody works.
Nothing. That finding is the reason for the architecture.
The strongest material on this page is not a claim about what we have built. It is a statement about what nobody has.
Read the instruments that touch a recording of a person working and the same thing is absent from all of them. There is no provision, in any instrument surveyed, conferring on a holder of personal data any positive entitlement in respect of it. No right to exclude. No right to be compensated for another's use. No term. No registry. A holder holds a file and a set of duties.
The asymmetry runs further than that. What protection exists in this area attaches to the person in the record, not to the party holding it, and it attaches because the person is identifiable rather than because they made what is in the record. The consequence is exact: if a recording of a worker escapes, the person with a remedy is the worker, not the holder.
The strongest right that might have been built over an accumulated machine record has also been switched off where it would have counted. Article 43 of the Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, provides that the database right shall not apply when data is obtained from or generated by a connected product or related service within the Regulation's scope. Whether a heavy industrial machine falls inside that definition has not been established, and we do not assert that it does. The direction is what matters: where the question has been answered at all, it has been answered against the holder.
Because the law hands a holder nothing, a promise to the person in the seat has to be built — in the architecture and in the paper — or it does not exist. That is what this company is.
Read that way, the list in the section above stops being modest. Provenance is not a status a holder is granted by an instrument and then displays. It is a chain a holder constructs, step by step, and then submits to being walked by somebody else. Tacit Source is the commercial licensor of Even Steven skills, under licence from Even Steven. That licence moves what may be marketed. It manufactures no entitlement the instruments decline to confer.
Walked in either direction.
Built forwards, from a person to an hour. Read backwards, from an hour to a person. The same six objects, and each holds the name of its neighbour, so a third party can start at whichever end it has.
Fig. 1 — The chain from a named person to a signed hour. Sealed objects carry a mark; dashed rules are boundaries information does not cross.
A person who worked the seat starts at their own name and reaches every hour that has run under it. The chain is not built so one side can inspect the other. It is built so either end can be reached from the other without taking anybody's word for it.
The routes to owning a technique are closed.
It is worth being exact about why none of this rests on owning a way of working. The routes that would reach a technique are closed, and closed by instruments that say so in terms.
A sequence of physical movements is not protectable expression. In Bikram's Yoga College of India v. Evolation Yoga, 803 F.3d 1032 (9th Cir. 2015), three grounds were pressed for protecting such a sequence and three were rejected. The court set the claim beside ordinary industrial method — "So too would a method to churn butter or drill for oil." It also named the manoeuvre it was refusing: that otherwise "one might obtain monopoly rights over these functional physical sequences by describing them in a tangible medium of expression and labeling them choreographic works."
Effort earns nothing either. Copyright rewards originality, not labour, and that rule is stated independently in Canadian, American and European authority. Fifteen years in a seat is a fact about a person's life. It is not a fact the intellectual property system is equipped to notice.
So the chain above is not a chain of title. Nobody standing in it owns the technique, ourselves included. It is a chain of origin, and origin is what a buyer's counsel is asking about.
Built so it cannot become property.
One right in this area already behaves the way attribution has to behave, and it is instructive. Under Canada's Copyright Act, s.14.1(2), moral rights "may not be assigned but may be waived in whole or in part." The right to be named cannot be bought off a person and then held by whoever bought it. It stays with the person. It can be given up. It cannot change hands.
Attribution here is built to the same shape. The name on a registry entry is the name of the person the entry came from. It is not transferable, not saleable, and not ours. A licence moves the right to run a way of working for a term. It never moves the name, and there is no instrument on our side that could move it.
That is also why the chain terminates where it does. Walked backwards far enough it stops at a person, not at a document and not at a company. And what we stand behind is a short list: the money owed, the count, and the deletion. Never the machine, never the job, never the output. Provenance is a statement about where a way of working came from. It is not a statement about what a machine will do with it.
Need to show a buyer where the skill on your machine came from?
Tell us what your own buyer asks you, and we will show you what travels with the hour.