Sources · Held in common
Community knowledge — the same words, a different Source.
Some knowledge is not one person's: a way of working held in common by the people who do it, a body of records an authority keeps, a method a region has and no single practitioner invented. The Source is a community, a nation or a public body, and the register's words for it are the same words.
What changes is who the Source is, whose agreement it is, and that the body's own governance comes first. The material stays where it is, the entry can be carried closed, and the rights offered are the ones the body chooses to offer.
A Source held in common, under its own authority.
Knowledge nobody in it calls their own. On this register a Source held in common is a description of a party, not a different kind of entry. The body stands where a person ordinarily stands: it is the Source, it is the party the agreement is with, and it is the party the count is read by.
The price of admission such a Source cannot pay. The ordinary price of admission to a register is the thing such a Source can least afford: hand the material over to be held, indexed and looked at. A body that holds knowledge in trust for the people it belongs to cannot meet that demand and should not be asked to. So the entry is built the other way round: the material stays inside the boundary it is already inside, and what crosses is a number, a Card and, where a licence exists, a coverage answer — as far as the carriage the body chose allows.
What does not change. The grammar of the number, the Card's five groups, the seal on an edition, the append-only history, the intake, the three licence kinds and the one public status word, Specified, are what they are on any other entry. No field means something different because of who the Source is — an address is only worth having if everybody resolves it the same way.
The same fields, with a body on the Source side.
| Field | What it carries |
|---|---|
| Source | The body, under its own authority, as the party that asserted the rights. Where the Source is carried coded, the register holds the code map and the name is withheld rather than absent. |
| Card | What the entry covers and what it refuses, in the body's own terms. The Scope and Refuses words are the body's to write, and the exclusions are as plain as the inclusions. |
| Carriage | Published, restricted or closed — where the entry is carried, chosen by the body, and never a rank. |
| Custody | Where the body already keeps the material. The record says that it exists and where it is held; it does not hold it. |
| Licence kinds offered | Execution, learning or derivative, as the body chooses to offer them — or none, which is a complete answer and is recorded as one. |
| Conditions | What the body puts on what may be made of its knowledge: a field of use, a territory, a use refused outright. |
| The count | Read by the body from its own end, against its own number, as any Source reads it. |
Read down, the record is ordinary. Read across, what it makes possible is not: a body can hold an address for what it knows, offer nothing at all under it, and still have a dated entry saying what the address covers. Offering is a decision separate from registering, and the register does not push a Source from the one to the other.
Four questions a body asks first, and where each is answered.
Custody. Registering a skill set does not require giving up custody of the material it was made from. The readable material stays where the body keeps it, on the body's own terms; what custody covers, and where the line runs, is set out on Trust.
Carriage. An entry is carried published, restricted or closed, and a body that will not have the existence of its entry disclosed takes the third: the number, the seal and the history are real, and the Book says nothing. How the three arrangements work, and why none is above another, is on the Registry.
Rights. Nothing is implied: a licence kind is offered because the body chose to offer it, and an action is permitted because the licence names it — Rights. A body that registers and offers nothing has done a complete thing, not half of one.
Withdrawal. A body ends what it started the way any Source does, on the register's ordinary dated rules, neither softened nor hardened because the Source is a body. On an execution licence: It stops for new work at once; a job already underway finishes. On a learning or derivative licence the rule is a dated one, and both are set out kind by kind on Protect.
Who this reaches. A buyer takes the same licence it would take anywhere on this register, answered by the same coverage question before a use; for counsel, the authority to contribute is a question the intake asks and this register records rather than answers. For the body, the four answers together are the whole of the offer: the material never leaves, the entry can be invisible, the rights are the ones it wrote, and it can stop.
The register does not decide who speaks for a community.
That is settled under the community's own governance, before anything is registered, and the intake records what was asserted and by whom.
Authority is settled elsewhere, and the record says who asserted it.
What the register does. The intake asks who is asserting rights in the material, on what authority, and what evidence stands behind the answer. It records the answers, the party that gave them and the date they were given, and it records that it has not tested them — Rights.
Nothing is registered on behalf of a community by anyone else. No researcher, no collector, no employer and no institution holding a copy can bring a body's knowledge onto this register in its name. The Source side of an entry is the body's own, and an intake that cannot establish as much ends in one of its four outcomes rather than in a number.
Where a body's own governance comes first. Indigenous knowledge is held under its own governance and its own protocols; those come first, the register's rules are the lesser of the two, and nothing beyond that sentence is claimed here.
For counsel. The record is evidence of what a party stated, on a date, with what was filed beside it — not a finding about the standing of the party that stated it. Standing is decided where such questions are decided, and nothing on this page settles it or is advice about it.
Each refusal below is a thing this subject invites, and the register does none of them.
Refused
What the register does not do when the Source is a body.
- It does not decide who speaks. Standing is a matter for the body's own governance, and the register records an assertion of it rather than ruling on one.
- It does not act for anybody. No entry is opened on a body's behalf, and no party stands between a body and its own side of the record.
- It does not read a closed entry's material. Custody means the material is not the register's to open, and closed carriage creates no exception.
- It names nobody. This page names no community, no nation, no public body and no programme, and the register's rules name none.
- It claims no relationship. Nothing here describes a process undertaken with anybody, and no word on this page stands in for one.
- It offers no status. The one public word is Specified, and an entry whose Source is a body carries it like any other.
Each refusal above is the same refusal read from another side: the register keeps a record, and a record is a weaker and more useful thing than a judgment.
What is left after the refusals is small and worth having: an address on knowledge held in common, in the body's own words, the material where it already sits, the entry disclosed or not as the body decides, whichever licence kinds it chooses or none, and a dated rule for ending it. That is the offer, and there is nothing underneath it.