What the law says,
and what it does not.
A licensee is not buying a data product. It is buying a machine that will run a named person's way of working, under that person's name, with that person paid for the hours it runs. This page sets out what the law says about that — including the parts nobody has settled — and names the instruments so they can be read.
Four questions counsel will ask before approving a licence.
Counsel approving a licence for a named way of working will want to know what the law says about a technique, about a recording of a person at work, about consent given inside an employment relationship, and about a machine that can go on learning after it is sold. Some of those have settled answers. Several do not. This page describes our own position and our own terms; it is not advice.
Technique is not property, and it is closed by instruments that say so.
The nearest decided case runs against it. In Bikram's Yoga College of India v. Evolation Yoga, 803 F.3d 1032 (9th Cir. 2015), three grounds were pressed for a fixed sequence of movements — expression, a compilation, a choreographic work — and three were rejected.
"So too would a method to churn butter or drill for oil."
Bikram's Yoga College of India v. Evolation Yoga (9th Cir. 2015)
It also names, and refuses, the manoeuvre a capture business is tempted by:
"one might obtain monopoly rights over these functional physical sequences by describing them in a tangible medium of expression and labeling them choreographic works."
The same judgment
Effort earns nothing: copyright rewards originality, not labour — Feist, 499 U.S. 340; CCH Canadian, 2004 SCC 13 at ¶16; Football Dataco, C-604/10 at ¶42. Fifteen years in a seat is a fact about a person's life, and not one the intellectual property system is built to notice.
Section 3(3) of the United Kingdom's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act puts the structural point on the face of a statute: where a work is not recorded by its author, it leaves open as a separate question whether copyright subsists in the record rather than in the work recorded. The work and the record of the work are separate objects, and that is the shape of this company.
Trade secret law does not reach it either. Recital 14 of Directive (EU) 2016/943 puts the experience and skills of employees outside the definition — it excludes
"the experience and skills gained by employees in the normal course of their employment."
Directive (EU) 2016/943, Recital 14
Article 1(3)(b) adds that nothing in it grounds "limiting employees' use of experience and skills honestly acquired in the normal course of their employment", and Article 3(1) puts "observation, study, disassembly or testing" among the lawful means of acquisition. American law arrives from the remedies end: under 18 U.S.C. §1836(b)(3)(A)(i)(I), conditions placed on a person's employment must rest on evidence of threatened misappropriation —
"and not merely on the information the person knows."
18 U.S.C. §1836(b)(3)(A)(i)(I)
Those provisions do not say a technique is insufficiently secret. They say a person is not a container a holder keeps closed.
What the law hands the holder of a recording: nothing.
No provision, in any instrument surveyed for this site, confers on a holder of personal data any positive entitlement in it. No right to exclude. No right to be compensated for another's use. No term. No registry. And it runs the other way: if a recording of a worker escapes, the person with a remedy is the worker, not the holder.
The strongest right that ever reached an accumulated machine record has, in Europe, been switched off where it would have counted. Article 43 of the Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, applying from 12 September 2025, 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.
We do not assert that a heavy industrial machine is a "connected product" within that Regulation's scope; that has not been established and is a question for counsel. What the Article shows without such an assertion is that the one accumulation right which could have grown into a property claim over machine records was withdrawn from that ground.
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.
What stands in place of an ownership claim is mechanism: a record sealed with the permission that was live when it was made; an entry held under one person's name and kept separately addressable; a package that carries no recording, because a machine never receives a session; a count signed at the machine. None of it is something the law does for us.
Tacit Source is the commercial licensor of Even Steven skills, under licence from Even Steven. The person in the seat signs with Even Steven and never with us.
Two objects, and what reaches each.
Fig. 1 — Two objects, and what reaches each. Dashed rules mark where a route stops and name what stops it.
One statute in the world pays for what cannot be patented.
German law has carried it since 1957. Alongside inventions, which must be patentable, the Gesetz über Arbeitnehmererfindungen covers technical improvement suggestions — which under § 3 are technical innovations that are nicht patent- oder gebrauchsmusterfähig. Non-patentability is not a bar there. It is the entry condition.
Under § 20(1), where such a suggestion gives the employer a preferential position similar to an industrial property right, the employee has a claim to reasonable compensation as soon as the employer exploits it. Not on submission — on exploitation. Under § 22 it cannot be waived in advance; it may be bargained over only once the suggestion is in the employer's hands.
The operative test, in the ministry's own compensation guidelines at Nr. 29, is non-imitability — the innovation cannot be imitated by third parties — and the first example given there is a secret process. And the limb that completes it: compensation ends once the innovation becomes known widely enough that competitors may lawfully use it.
§ 20 confers no property right of any kind. It is a claim to money against one employer, arising only once that employer exploits the suggestion. It cannot be sold, licensed or asserted against anyone else, and it falls away when the technique becomes generally known.
Whether von Dritten nicht nachgeahmt werden können — that an innovation cannot be imitated by third parties — means practically impossible to copy, or kept secret, is unresolved. It is a question of German law for German counsel.
We do not operate under it and nothing here depends on it. What it establishes is that a legislature has already written down that a technique which cannot be patented can still be worth paying its author for, that payment follows use rather than ownership, and that the claim cannot be signed away in advance. Our papers are built the same way round.
One other statute makes the move from a different direction. Under 17 U.S.C. § 114(g)(2), 45 per cent of statutory-licence receipts go to the featured artist and 5 per cent to non-featured performers, paid directly. That second share goes to session players who hold no copyright at all. The statute pays them because they contributed, not because they own.
A recording of a person working is personal information.
Four definitions, read in the original: PIPEDA s.2(1); Alberta PIPA s.1(1)(k); British Columbia PIPA s.1; GDPR Article 4(1). Every one turns on identifiability, and none contains any concept resembling authorship or contribution. The person recorded is protected because they are identifiable in the record — not because they made what is in it.
Identifiability in a record of movement is not a label attached to the movement. It is the movement. Nair, Guo, Mattern, Wang, O'Brien, Rosenberg and Song, in Unique Identification of 50,000+ Virtual Reality Users from Head & Hand Motion Data at the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium in 2023, identified users of a commercial virtual-reality game — tens of thousands of them, playing ordinarily, with no biometric enrolment — from head and hand motion alone, better than nine times in ten, from around a hundred seconds of motion. Treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a settled figure, and do not read it across to gait: no gait study at comparable scale exists. The record sets out what a session carries.
A movement trace with the individuating detail taken out is a movement trace with the skill taken out.
We never claim that a record is anonymous, anonymized, de-identified or aggregated. Nothing in our position rests on any such claim, and saying it would be false. A record is personal information, and the person in it keeps every right that comes with that.
One further rule follows from the same place, and it is absolute. A record is never supplied to assess the person — not to an insurer, not to an employer, not to anyone.
Consent, and the open question underneath it.
Consent given at work is fragile, and the regulators say so in terms:
"Given the imbalance of power between an employer and its staff members, 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 on consent under Regulation 2016/679, ¶¶21–23
The test is not whether something was signed. It is what happens to the person who says no. Which is why we do not contract with the person in the seat. A person signs with Even Steven — in their own seat, on their own machine, on their own time. Not with their employer, and not with us.
Then the harder question, without euphemism: does paying a person for a recording affect whether their consent to be recorded is valid? It is open. No jurisdiction surveyed provides that paying a person makes their consent valid, and none provides that it spoils it. The European material concerns money flowing from the individual to the controller — a discount in exchange for data. This arrangement runs the other way, and no regulator has endorsed that reading or rejected it.
One legislature has written down how such an arrangement may work. California Civil Code § 1798.125(b) allows a business to offer financial incentives, "including payments to consumers as compensation", for the collection of personal information — subject to prior opt-in consent, a bar on terms "unjust, unreasonable, coercive, or usurious in nature", and a requirement that any difference be "reasonably related to the value provided". Since 1 January 2023 a California employee is a "consumer". That shape is the one we built to.
- The payment follows the hour the machine runs, not the signature. Nothing to gain by signing, nothing to lose by declining.
- It is not a sale of data. It is a fee for a performance, from which a recording happens to result. The first structure invites the objection; the second does not.
- Consent is four separate papers — to be recorded; to be held alongside others; to run under one's own name; to be used to train a model. Each is signed and ended on its own, free, on the person's own say, effective on receipt, and each is read at the moment of recording. The fourth is the one this architecture does not depend on.
If the open question closed tomorrow, in either direction, not one of those four would change.
The law reaches the record. It never reaches the technique.
Everything below is what a party has to build once that is accepted, rather than something an instrument confers.
Notice and disclosure, where it is actually written down.
Three regimes, read in the original. No others are named here.
| Where | What it requires | What kind of duty |
|---|---|---|
| Canada — federal undertakings | Canada Labour Code, Part I, ss. 51–54. At least 120 days' notice to the bargaining agent before a technological change, with five prescribed contents; the Board may order it ceased for a further 120 days. | A notice period, to a bargaining agent. |
| British Columbia | Labour Relations Code s.54 — 60 days, on a broader trigger, with no reinstatement remedy. | A shorter period, a wider trigger. |
| Ontario | Employment Standards Act s.41.1.1 — employers with 25 or more employees must have a written electronic-monitoring policy. | A disclosure duty. Not a limitation duty. |
Ontario's own guide is unusually candid about the last of those. The requirement, it says, does "not establish a right for employees not to be electronically monitored", and does "not create any new privacy rights". It is a duty to say what you do. It is not a duty to stop.
That is the pattern across all three: notice, and disclosure. None supplies a limit on what may be recorded, or any mechanism by which the person recorded is paid. This section describes our own position, not a reader's obligations.
A released package does not learn in the field.
Directive (EU) 2024/2853 applies from 9 December 2026 and, under Article 2(1), to products placed on the market after that date. A machine is unambiguously a product.
Article 7(2)(c) makes post-deployment learning a factor in whether a product was defective. A court must take into account:
"the effect on the product of any ability to continue to learn or acquire new features after it is placed on the market or put into service."
Directive (EU) 2024/2853, Article 7(2)(c)
Recital 32 carries the policy:
"a manufacturer that designs a product with the ability to develop unexpected behaviour should remain liable for behaviour that causes harm."
Directive (EU) 2024/2853, Recital 32
Article 4(18), with Recital 40, is the provision a maker's counsel reads twice. A post-supply change is a substantial modification where it counts as substantial under product-safety rules, or where it both changes "the product's original performance, purpose or type" unforeseen in the initial risk assessment and changes the nature of the hazard, creates a new hazard or increases the risk. Recital 40 says such a modification may arise "due to the continuous learning of an AI system", the modified product then being made available on the market at the moment the modification is made. Article 8(2) makes whoever carried it out a manufacturer in their own right; Article 17(1)(b) restarts the ten-year clock.
Continuous learning can constitute a substantial modification where the two-part test is met. It is untested: no judgment anywhere has addressed whether routine incremental refinement crosses the threshold.
A released package is fixed. It does not learn in the field, and it does not change on a machine without a person deliberately putting a new one there and signing for it. A change to what a machine runs is a release — with a date, a signature and a version. Never a drift.
That is a design decision rather than a reading of Article 4(18), and it is what makes the Article easy to answer: there is no routine refinement on the machine to characterize. And no part of any safety case rests on anything we supply.
Withdrawal, against a model trained the ordinary way.
Three claims are routinely blurred into one, and the difference decides what a promise of withdrawal is worth.
| The claim | What it is | How it has to be written |
|---|---|---|
| Verifying, from a delivered model's parameters, that one person's influence was removed | A formal result. | It cannot be done. It is formally unavailable from the model itself. |
| Removing influence from a large generative model by approximate unlearning | Not achieved. | No published method has survived an adversarial evaluation. Evidence, not impossibility. |
| Exact unlearning at generative scale | Absent. | No published construction exists at that scale. |
| Retraining from scratch without a person's material | Always correct, always available. | It works in every case, at a price — which is what makes the honest version of the promise affordable at the size a named registry actually is. |
The first is not an engineering gap that time will close:
"We cannot prove unlearning by showing that the parameters of the unlearned model are obtained without training on the unlearned data."
Thudi, Jia, Shumailov & Papernot — On the Necessity of Auditable Algorithmic Definitions for Machine Unlearning, USENIX Security 2022
Unlearning, the same authors state, "can only be defined at the level of the algorithms used for learning and unlearning, and not by reasoning over the model parameters they output." Unlearning is therefore not a property of a model but of a history — and histories are attested, not measured.
A right to withdraw can be honoured today — in a database, in a retrieval index, in a small model, and in anything kept separately addressable. It cannot be honoured, in any way a second party can check, in a large generative model trained the ordinary way.
Everything this company licenses sits on the honourable side of that line. A skill is one named person's way of running one family of machine: held under that name, chosen by that name before work starts, metered by the hour, ended by that person. A set is several such entries under one paper — a shelf, not a stew. Separability is not a feature. It is the condition on which every other promise here can be kept. Where a model is involved at all, retraining from scratch remains always correct and always available at a price.
What is open, and what we did about it.
Five questions here have no answer anywhere. Each is paired with the decision that keeps the answer from deciding what the person in the seat gets.
| The open question | Where it stands | What is built, so the answer does not decide it |
|---|---|---|
| Is a movement-only trace a biometric identifier? | No court and no regulator has answered it. | Every record is held as personal information and as identifying, in every jurisdiction. No de-identification claim appears in our papers. |
| Does paying a person affect the validity of their consent? | No jurisdiction surveyed provides that payment makes consent valid, nor that it spoils it. | The payment follows the hour a machine runs, not the signature, and consent is given to Even Steven. |
| Does routine refinement amount to a substantial modification? | Untested. No judgment anywhere has addressed it. | A released package is fixed between deliberate, signed releases. There is no routine refinement to characterize. |
| Does an erasure right reach model parameters? | No court anywhere has decided it. | Nothing is dissolved into parameters. An entry stays separately addressable, so a withdrawal is executed rather than argued about. |
| Does naming a person as the source of a machine's way of working change that person's exposure? | No court anywhere has decided it. | The name is carried as a narrow, factual, historical credit — never as an endorsement. |
None of those five is a gap in our reading. They are gaps in the world; more reading does not close them. What closes them is a court, a regulator or a legislature. Until one does, a company in this position can do one useful thing: build so that its own answer holds either way.
Counsel reading this for a licensee?
Tell us which one you are. The licence, the consents and the interface specification go to counsel on both sides before anything is signed.