Four permissions, given and ended one at a time.
A person in a seat gives four permissions, and they are four separate papers. Each is signed on its own. Each is ended on its own. Each is free, on the person's own say, needs nobody's agreement, and takes effect on receipt. They are held by Even Steven, who is the person's counterparty. Tacit Source never contracts with the person in the seat.
One form would be cheaper. It would also be a different promise.
A single consent form can only be given whole or refused whole. Four papers let a person permit one thing and refuse another, and take one back years later without losing the rest. The separation is the promise, and everything else on this page follows from it.
Each paper names one permission and nothing else. A person may sign all four, or three, or one. A refused paper is simply not there, and nothing reads it. An ended paper leaves the others standing.
No paper is a condition of any other paper, of being recorded at all, of being paid, or of anything a person does at work. A permission that has to be given to get something else is not a permission, and we do not build one.
- Signed on its own
- Four signatures, four papers, four dates.Never one signature covering four things.
- Ended on its own
- Ending one leaves the others standing.The person chooses which, and says so in writing.
- Free
- Ending a permission costs the person nothing.No fee, no notice period, no penalty.
- Effective on receipt
- It takes effect when it arrives, not when it is accepted.Nobody's agreement is required, ours included.
What each one permits, and what it does not.
Each entry says what the permission opens and where it stops. A permission with no stated edge is a permission to anything.
One · To be recorded
It permits a recording to be made of this person working their own machine, on their own job, in their own seat. The recording is sealed when it is made and carries inside itself who made it and what they permitted.
It does not permit that recording to be held beside anyone else's, to be named, or to be used as training material. Those are the other three papers. A recording made under this paper alone sits under this paper alone.
Two · To be held alongside others
It permits the record to be held in the registry among other people's records, each entry addressed by name, one at a time.
It does not permit merging. Being held alongside is not being mixed in. Entries are never averaged together, fitted into one another or resolved into a single thing. A set is a shelf, not a stew, and this paper is a permission to sit on the shelf.
Three · To run under their own name
It permits the person's name to travel with the skill, so that a licensee knows whose way of working is running on their machine and every counted hour traces back to one person.
It does not permit any other use of the name. It is not an endorsement, not advertising, and not a listing anyone can buy. A record is never supplied to assess the person, to an insurer or to anyone else.
Four · To be used to train a model
It permits the record to be used as training material.
It does not permit anything on the three papers above, and none of them depends on it. It is asked separately, signed separately, ended separately, and refusing it changes nothing about whether a person's skill can be registered, licensed, released, run and paid for.
It is separate, and the architecture on this site does not depend on it.
Most arrangements that pay a person for a recording pay them because the recording went into a model. Ours does not. A skill here is selected by name before the work starts and metered by the machine-hour it runs, and nothing about that requires the record to have trained anything.
A skill is selected by name and metered by the hour it runs. That is a counting problem, not a training problem.
The consequence is worth stating flatly. A person who signs the first three papers and refuses the fourth has a named entry in the registry, a licence over it, a release path to a machine, a signed count line for every hour it runs, and payment from that same signed row. The release path never reads the fourth paper. The count never reads it. The money owed never reads it.
We do not need the fourth paper to make this work, and a refusal of it carries no consequence we could impose: there is nothing downstream for it to switch off.
Four tracks, four switches, and one that goes nowhere near a machine.
Fig. 1 — Four permissions on four tracks. The dashed rule is the boundary the fourth paper never crosses.
Consent is read at the moment of recording, and never looked up afterwards.
This is the rule that makes the other rules mean something, and it is the one most often got wrong elsewhere. The permission that governs a session is the permission that was live at the instant the session was made.
Identity, permission and terms travel inside the sealed record, not in a register standing beside it. A register beside the record can be edited, replaced or reconstructed later, and the record itself carries no trace of it. A permission carried inside a sealed record cannot be back-dated without breaking the seal, and a broken seal is visible.
So a consent given later does not reach back over a session already made. A session recorded when the permission was not live does not pass admission, and no permission obtained afterwards admits it. The refusal names its reason and the session stays refused. Nothing is admitted silently, and nothing is admitted retrospectively.
The rule runs the other way too, and this is the half a person notices last. Ending a permission does not un-make sessions that were lawfully made while it was live; it stops new ones, and it starts the deletion. What happens to the records and to a machine already running is set out on the withdrawal page, and the timing there is exact.
Not with their employer. Not with us.
Consent given by an employee to an employer is the weakest consent there is, and European regulators say so in terms. The answer to that is not better wording. It is a different counterparty.
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 21–23
The Board's test turns on what happens to the person who declines. Inside an employment relationship that is difficult to answer honestly, because the imbalance of power is the relationship. Wherever the employer is the party asking, a refusal has somewhere to land.
So the employer is not a party to any of the four papers. The employer does not hold them, does not see them, does not countersign them and is not asked to agree to an ending.
Nor do we hold them. Tacit Source is the commercial licensor of Even Steven skills, under licence from Even Steven. We deal with machine makers, kit companies and fleet owners. We are not the person's counterparty and we never become one, in any document, at any point in the chain.
The person signs with Even Steven: in their own seat, on their own machine, on their own job. That is the structural answer to the consent problem, and the reason to prefer it is plain — a person declining a paper is declining something their employer never offered and never sees.
A different counterparty removes the employer from the transaction. It does not repeal employment law, and it does not decide every question a regulator might ask about a recording made at a place of work. It answers the specific objection the guideline raises, which is about who is asking and what a refusal costs.
Whether paying a person makes their consent valid is not settled anywhere.
The question, in one sentence. Whether paying a person for a recording of their work makes their consent to that recording valid, or spoils it.
It is open. No jurisdiction surveyed provides that paying a person makes their consent valid, and none provides that it spoils it. That is a fact about the world rather than a hesitation of ours.
What we built, so the answer does not change what the person gets. The payment follows the hour the machine runs, not the signature. Nobody is paid for signing a paper. A person whose skill is never selected is paid nothing, however many papers they signed. A person whose skill is selected is paid for every hour it runs, out of the same signed row the licensee is invoiced from. The arrangement is a fee for work performed, from which a recording results — not the sale of a record.
That construction does not decide the question, and we do not claim it does. It makes the question stop mattering to the person in the seat: whichever way it is answered, what they are paid for is an hour a machine ran, and what they can end is a permission they gave.
California Civil Code § 1798.125(b) provides that a business may offer financial incentives, including payments to consumers as compensation, for the collection of personal information. It is subject to prior opt-in consent, to a bar on terms that are "unjust, unreasonable, coercive, or usurious in nature", and to a requirement that any difference be "reasonably related to the value provided". Since 1 January 2023 a California employee is a "consumer" for this purpose.
It is one statute in one state and it settles nothing outside it. It is cited here because it is the one place a legislature has written the conditions down rather than leaving them to be inferred.
Every licensed hour rests on the four papers above.
Machine makers, kit companies and fleet owners deal with Tacit Source. The person in the seat never does.