The Tacit Tessera Principles
Six principles, and what each one refuses.
These six commitments are what this register is built to. Under each: what it means in the mechanism, what it does not mean, and the reader it protects.
Every registered skill set has an identity that persists.
In the mechanism. One number is issued to one skill set, in ten characters with the sector letter first, and it is never reused. Editions sit under it and representations under those, so the number does not change when what a machine can use does.
What it does not mean. Persistence is a promise about the address, not about the thing addressed. A number does not make a skill set current, correct or still in use.
Who it protects. The person in the seat, whose name stays beside the number rather than instead of it; and an OEM's procurement officer, who can name a skill set in a specification and still be naming the same thing years later.
Its source stays part of its record.
In the mechanism. A Card reads Collected by, Owned by Even Steven, Licensed by Tacit Tessera: the source is a field, not a credit line. Every served passage and every work product names the number and edition it came from.
What it does not mean. The register does not infer attribution. It keeps provenance where a contribution stays separately addressable, and claims nothing beyond that.
Who it protects. The person the skill came from; and counsel, because a source that is a field can be pleaded and a source that is a courtesy cannot.
A new edition never erases the old one.
In the mechanism. An edition is frozen and sealed. A later edition supersedes it and the earlier one stays readable, so a paper signed against it can still be read against what it covered. A correction is recorded as its own event.
What it does not mean. Supersession is not deletion. A challenge is recorded and left on the record while it runs.
Who it protects. Counsel on both sides, who need to know which version a paper was signed against; and the person, whose record cannot be tidied.
Registration records provenance. It does not establish that a skill set is safe, accurate or fit for any particular purpose.
In the mechanism. The intake tests rights and nothing else, and ends in one of four outcomes. What an entry claims is what was asserted, by whom, on what date, and what evidence was filed with it.
What it does not mean. An entry is not an approval, a rating or a finding of quality, and its subject is a skill set and never a person. A licence permits a use; it never requires one. The machine's own safety logic refuses whenever it refuses.
Who it protects. An OEM's procurement officer, entitled to know what a registration is worth in a purchase; and the person, who is never the thing measured.
Registering a skill set does not require giving up custody of the material it was made from.
In the mechanism. The register holds the address, the rights record and the licence. The readable material stays where its holder keeps it, and the local copy is the default, not an upgrade.
What it does not mean. Custody is not something this register promises to secure; it is something nothing in registration takes. Lodging a copy with a third party is a separate arrangement with its own trade, stated as open rather than offered as settled.
Who it protects. A practice with files it cannot hand over, and the person whose sessions are the material.
Commercial use follows explicit rights. The register records what was asserted, and records that it has not tested the assertion.
In the mechanism. Three licence kinds are offered — execution, learning and derivative — each with a term, a field of use and a territory, and inside each the actions are named one by one. Consent is four separate papers, each given and ended on its own.
What it does not mean. Nothing is implied from silence: a right not asserted is not recorded, and a right recorded was not thereby tested. The register documents; it does not warrant title, and it does not adjudicate.
Who it protects. Everyone on the chain — the person, whose consent is what a learning licence rests on; the licensee, who can see what was asserted and what was not; and counsel, who can tell the two apart.