Panscia Commons Policy

1. What this policy is

Panscia is a network of catalogues. Each catalogue is a node: one person's machine, holding material that person has chosen to publish and license. The network's registry lists what the nodes hold, relays requests to them, and takes a small service fee. Buyers are, in the main, software agents acting for a person.

This policy governs every licence granted on the network. Its approach is that of an open licence: the material remains the property of the node owner, and what a payment grants is a narrowly scoped licence to use it, not ownership of it. It is written to be read by the three parties it binds — the owner who publishes, the agent that acts, and the person the agent acts for — and to be short enough that all three actually read it.

2. Parties and terms

• Owner. The person who runs a node and publishes material on it. The owner is the licensor of everything on their node.
• Material. A file the owner has listed: a document, image, audio or video recording, dataset, or text. Also the passages and answers a node returns about a file, which are pieces of, or statements drawn from, that material.
• Listing. The free public description of a file: title, description, what it is usable for, what it says about its own origin, its price.
• Agent. Software that reads listings and requests material on someone's behalf. Agents have no account on the network and no identity beyond the payments they make.
• Person. The human the agent is working for, who pays or authorises payment. Where this policy says the licensee, it means the person, acting through the agent.
• Task. The piece of work the person asked for at the time the material was licensed, including its revisions, until it is delivered. See 4.2.
• Registry operator. Whoever runs the registry (today, Panscia). The operator is not a party to any licence. It provides the listings, the relay and the standards, and charges a service fee for doing so.

3. What the network offers, and what each thing grants

Offer	Cost	What you receive	What it grants
Search and listings	free	descriptions, uses, provenance, prices	nothing beyond reading it
Preview	free	a thumbnail or short excerpt	nothing beyond judging the file
Passages	5% of the file's licence price a question	up to three verbatim pieces of the file that bear on a question; never more than a fifth of the file per credential	the single-task licence, over those pieces
Answer	12% of the file's licence price a question	one fact in two sentences, written by the node's model from the whole file	the single-task licence, over the answer
Licence	the file's price	the file	the single-task licence, over the file

Sessions of questions on one file are priced as fixed fractions too. The figures in this table are those in force when this draft was written; the network fee policy (/network/fee-policy on the registry) is authoritative, every node and every agent reads it live, and any change to it is dated in the change log below. The fractions are network standards, published in the fee policy and the same on every node, so that no route is a cheaper way to read a file than licensing it. The owner sets one number per file: its licence price.

4. The single-task licence

4.1 The grant

You acquire a single-task licence. The owner retains all rights. Use the material to complete the task at hand, then do not retain, redistribute, republish or train on it.

This sentence appears on every listing page, in every paid response, and in the instructions every agent receives on connecting. It is the licence. The rest of this section says what its words mean.

4.2 A task

A task is the piece of work the person asked for at the time of payment: the report, the story, the analysis, the answer, the design, the episode. It includes the drafts and revisions of that work until the person has it. It ends when the work is delivered.

A new request is a new task, even from the same person, even about the same subject, and needs a new licence. Two requests that are plainly the same piece of work — a draft and its rewrite, a question and its follow-up — are one task.

4.3 What the licensee may do

• Read the material and use what it says to do the task.
• Quote from it in the work: enough to make the point, not enough to stand in for the material. Quotation in the work is bounded the way passages are: no more than a fifth of the file in total, and never the whole of a short one. A quotation carries attribution (section 5).
• Adapt from it: draw on its facts, its structure, its voice, its technique, to make something new for the task. The new thing belongs to whoever made it. The material inside it does not.
• Hand the finished work to the person, who may keep and use the work. The work is the person's; the material it drew on is still the owner's.

4.4 What the licensee may not do

• Retain. Keep the material beyond the task. For a person that means a file on disk after the work is done; for an agent it means a store, a memory, a cache, an index, a vector database. Material in an agent's context window while it does the task is use, not retention. Material written somewhere it will outlive the task is retention.
• Redistribute. Give the material, or a substantial part of it, to anyone else, in any form, with or without payment.
• Republish. Post it, host it, print it, include it in a product or a dataset, or make it findable anywhere.
• Train. Use the material, in whole or in part, as training, fine-tuning or evaluation data for any model, or to build an index or embedding store that persists beyond the task. This prohibition holds under every licence and every route on the network, and no scope will ever lift it (section 12). The only way a model learns from Panscia material is by asking, each time, and paying each time.
• Assemble. Reconstruct a file, or a substantial part of one, from passages and answers across several questions or several tasks. The node bounds how much any one credential can see; the licence bounds what the licensee may do with the pieces. Piecing a file together through questions is a breach whether or not the code would have allowed it.

4.5 Passages and answers

A passage is a piece of the file and an answer is a statement drawn from it. Both are material under this licence, on the same terms as the file: use them for the task, quote them with attribution, do not keep, pass on, publish or train on them. A question credential does not unlock the file; the file is its own licence.

4.6 Where the material lives

The licence is for work, and the work happens in the agent's environment. The agent is the custodian of what it licenses, under every scope:

• Licensed material is held in the agent's working environment. It is not written to the person's folders, drives, mail or chats, and the person is not handed the file. The agent shows it or quotes it as the work needs; showing is use, handing over is not.
• Single-task: discarded by the agent when the task ends.
• Retained (section 12): kept by the agent, in a store it manages for that person's work, and used whenever it works for them. Not exported as a standalone file.
• Embed (section 12): held by the agent until placed in the one published work. The only copy that leaves is the one inside that work.

The person paid and may see everything their agent licensed. What they do not receive is a loose copy, because a loose copy is where every escape starts: it can be mailed, uploaded, dropped into another tool, or swept into a backup a model later reads. The network delivers accordingly. The connector fetches into the agent; the manual checkout page gives a retrieval link for the agent and no download; that link, opened in a browser, explains itself and stays unspent. Every delivery carries its custody instruction.

This is not rights management and does not claim to be. An agent's environment may be a folder on the person's own disk, and a command line can fetch what a browser is refused. The rule governs where the agent puts things, what it declines to do when asked, and what a person may not do with a copy they went out of their way to obtain.

4.7 Duration and termination

The licence lasts for the task and ends with it. It ends early if the licensee breaches it. The owner may withdraw a file from the network at any time; licences already granted stand for the tasks they were granted for.

5. Attribution

Where licensed material, or a quotation or fact drawn from it, appears in the work, the work says where it came from, in a form a reader can follow:

Source: title, from the node node name, Panscia — catalogue URL

The catalogue URL is on every listing and in every paid response as catalogue_url. Where the work has no room for a reference (a caption, a sentence in a chat), the node name and title suffice. Attribution is not a substitute for a licence, and a licence does not remove the duty to attribute.

6. The owner's warranties

By listing material on a node, its owner states that:

1. They hold the rights. They created the material, or hold rights sufficient to license it on these terms. They do not list what is not theirs to license.
2. It is not someone else's private data. Material about other people — their records, their correspondence, their likeness, their personal details — is not listed without those people's consent. Nodes scrub obvious personal identifiers from indexed text at ingest; the scrub is a safeguard, not a permission.
3. It is lawful. Nothing infringing, nothing illegal to hold or to distribute, nothing that the owner would not be willing to be named as the publisher of.
4. Listings are honest. The description says what the file is, and its kind, provenance and reliable_for say so plainly: fiction as fiction, synthetic data as synthetic, a record as a record. How a node writes and filters a listing, and how the owner can write it themselves, is set out in full in section 14. This is stated as what the work is, never as a warning against it. A work of fiction is a source for the fiction; it is not passed off as a record of real events.
5. The price is the price. The listing's price is what the node charges. Question prices follow from it by the published standards.

An owner who cannot make these statements about a file does not list it.

7. The agent's obligations

An agent acting on the network, and the person it acts for, agree that the agent will:

1. Read before paying. Listings, previews and the forecast in every 402 response exist so that nothing is paid for blind. A question the forecast says is empty or refused is not paid for.
2. Confirm the price with the person before paying it. The price is on the listing. No purchase is started — no licence requested, no one sent to a checkout page — until the person has agreed to it.
3. Rely on each thing for what it is. Every listing is a primary source for something, and its reliable_for line says what: a work of fiction for its own text, which is what a reviewer, a student or an adapter needs; an essay for its author's argument; a personal record for the events it records; a dataset for its figures; a photograph for what it shows. The agent does not set a listing aside for being fiction, and does not cite a work for something outside what it is a source for.
4. Credit the node. Section 5.
5. Report honestly. The report mechanism (section 9) is for material that is both materially different from its listing and appears unlawful. It is not for price, quality or disappointment.
6. Never train. Nothing received on any route — a listing, a preview, a passage, an answer, a file — is used to train, fine-tune or evaluate a model, or kept in any store that outlives the task. This is the one rule with no exception anywhere on the network.

8. Prices, payment and fees

• The owner sets each file's licence price. Question prices are fixed fractions of it, set by the network standards in the fee policy and the same on every node. There is a network-wide minimum for a licence and for a question.
• Payment is by Lightning invoice, from the agent's wallet or from the person's, and is final when it settles. There is no account, no balance, no refund mechanism on the network. A payment that bought nothing — a question the node failed to answer — is handed back as a still-valid credential, not refunded.
• The network fee is a service fee to the registry operator, a small percentage of each sale with a floor, published in the fee policy. It is included in the price the buyer pays and remitted by the node. It is not a licence fee and does not make the operator a licensor or a party to the licence. The owner is the licensor and receives the rest.
• An invoice's description names only what was bought — a passages question, an answer, a file licence, the network fee — never which file.

9. Breach, reports and removal

Breach by a licensee. Retaining, redistributing, republishing, training on or assembling licensed material ends the licence for that material and is a breach of these terms by the person the agent acted for. The owner may pursue it as they would any breach of licence. The registry operator, on a credible report, may refuse further service to the wallets or clients involved.

Breach by an owner. Material that is not the owner's to license, that is another person's private data, that is unlawful, or whose listing is materially false, may be reported by anyone: an agent through report_node, a person through the report link on any catalogue page. Reports go to a person at the registry operator. Nothing is disabled automatically. On review, the operator may remove a listing, remove a node from the network, or do nothing, and says which. An owner may take their own material down at any time by making it unavailable on their node; the registry's copy of the listing follows within minutes.

What a report is for. Material that is both different from its listing and appears unlawful. Categories: child sexual abuse material, copyright infringement, classified material, private data, fraud, other. A report describes what was received; it never attaches the material itself.

10. Privacy

The network is built not to collect personal information, and this policy holds the operator to that:

• No accounts. Agents and persons are not registered, identified or tracked. A credential is a paid invoice, nothing more.
• Owners are identified by a node id and a name they choose. The registry holds their node's public address, listings and fee ledger; it does not hold their files, their storage credentials, or where their files live.
• Listings do not carry the owner's storage provider, file paths or provider file ids. Indexed text, the published excerpt and the text shown to the owner's model are scrubbed of obvious personal identifiers at ingest (section 14.3, including what the scrub does not cover).
• Invoice descriptions name the purpose of a payment, never the file, so wallet providers and routing infrastructure learn nothing about what was bought.
• Reports are read by a person and kept only as long as needed to act on them.

11. Enforcement stance

Enforcement of this licence is normative and contractual, as it is for any published licence. The code bounds what it can: how much of a file a credential may see, how many passages, how long an answer, what a listing reveals. Everything past that line — what the licensee does with what they were given — is governed by these terms and enforced by the owner's rights, the operator's power to refuse service, and the reputations of those who use the network. The network does not pretend to technical enforcement it does not have, and does not build surveillance to get it.

12. Scopes an owner may offer

The single-task licence is the only licence every file carries and the default always. Two further scopes exist, each off by default, each switched on per file by its owner, each priced at a fixed multiple of the file's price set by network standard (the multiples below are those in force at the date of this draft; the fee policy is authoritative):

Scope	For	Grants	Price
single-task	any file	use for one task, then let go	the file's price
retained	any file	the agent keeps the file and reuses it across the licensee's own work; not exported as a file; no redistribution, no publishing, no training	10×
embed	media only: images, audio, video	show the file, as-is or edited, inside one identified published work, with attribution and a machine-readable training reservation where it appears; a second work is a second licence; no distribution of the file itself, no reuse elsewhere, no training	20×

Each scope has a stable URL under /license/… and a machine-readable record with the same fields as the single-task one: scope, retain, redistribute, derivatives, train, attribution, rightsHolder, custody. Custody is with the agent under every scope (section 4.6). Attribution is required under every scope. Derivatives for the work are allowed under every scope. train is false under every scope.

Why embed exists, and why only for media. Text is used by reading it; what reaches the work is facts, structure, voice and a bounded quotation, and the file never leaves the node. A photograph or a recording cannot be paraphrased: its value is that it is a record of one real thing, and using it means showing it. Without this scope, media on the network could be studied but never used. With it, the owner is paid per work, the work is what is published, and the file is never the product.

Its guards, and their limits. Images are delivered with the owner's name, the licence URL and an IPTC/PLUS do-not-train flag written into their metadata; the licensee leaves that in and carries a machine-readable training reservation where the work appears. These are what the major crawlers say they honour. They do not stop a scraper that ignores them. They turn an escape into a documented breach with the owner's name inside the file. A published image is exposed; that is why this scope is opt-in, priced for it, and never the default.

Two scopes are deliberately absent and will stay absent:

• Training. No licence on this network permits it. The owner's reward is continuous because the knowledge stays with the owner; a licence to train would sell it once and end every sale after.
• Republishing as-is. Panscia is a source of knowledge for work, not a marketplace for the files themselves. Embed is one work with attribution and a reservation, not stock.

13. Versions

This policy is versioned. A licence is granted under the version in force when its payment settled, and later versions do not change it. Changes are announced on the registry and dated here. The URL /license/single-task does not change; it is the license value in every record and every agent response already in the wild.

14. How a node indexes and lists a file

This section is for the owner. It sets out every rule a node applies between a file arriving in a connected folder and its listing appearing on the network: what is read, what is changed, what is written for you, what is held back, and what is never published. None of it is hidden and none of it is discretionary; the same rules run on every node.

14.1 Before anything is read

• A model you chose. A node reads no files until its owner has connected a model (any provider, with the owner's own key) and that model has passed the node's listing check. Without one, sources are not read at all.
• A wallet. A node with no wallet indexes but is not on the network: no registration, no published listings.
• Only the folder you connected. A cloud connector sees one app folder and nothing else in the account.

14.2 Which files are indexed

• Text and documents: .txt .md .rtf .html .xml .json .csv .yaml .yml .rst .log .docx .pdf .xlsx .pptx .pages .key
• Images: .jpg .jpeg .png .gif .webp .bmp
• Audio: .mp3 .wav .m4a .ogg .flac .aac .wma
• Video: .mp4 .mov .avi .mkv .webm .m4v

Anything else is skipped and named in the dashboard with the reason and, where there is one, the fix ("older Word format — re-save it as .docx", "archives aren't opened — add the files themselves"). A supported file with no readable text inside (a scanned PDF with no text layer) is skipped and said so. A file is read again only when it is new or has changed; a file removed from the folder is withdrawn from sale.

14.3 What is changed in the text that is indexed

Before text is stored, split into passages, or shown to any model, the node replaces four shapes with a marker: email addresses, North American phone numbers, US social security numbers, and Visa card numbers. The same scrub is applied to the excerpt published with the listing, and to the text sent to your model to write the listing.

This is a coarse net, not a guarantee (section 6.2). It does not recognise names, addresses, other countries' identifiers or anything in an image. The licensed file itself is delivered exactly as you stored it, unscrubbed. The scrub protects what is searchable and quotable; what you choose to sell is your decision and your warranty.

Media is described on the node itself: an image is captioned, audio and the sound of a video are transcribed (a video with no sound is described from a frame), by models that run on your machine. A media file that cannot be described is still indexed, under its file name. Nothing from a media file is sent anywhere to be indexed.

14.4 What is written for you, and by whom

For a text file, your model is shown the first 12,000 characters (scrubbed) and asked for six things. It is instructed not to reproduce the contents: no quotations, no figures, no names from the text, no statement of the file's conclusions — the listing must let an agent judge the file without giving it away.

Field	What it holds
Description	What the file is and what it covers, in about two sentences
Kind	What sort of thing it is, in a librarian's plain words
Origin	One of: original work, personal record, dataset, compilation, captured
Origin note	One sentence on where it comes from
Reliable for	One plain sentence: what the file is a source for
Uses	At least two uses specific to this file

For a media file the description is the caption or the start of the transcript, origin is "captured", and the other fields are set by the node.

A text file under 200 characters is too short to describe and gets no listing from the model; its owner can write one (14.7).

14.5 The wording rules

These are fixed pattern rules that run on the node. No model applies them, nothing is sent anywhere to apply them, and they cost nothing. They apply the same way whether the model or the owner wrote the words.

Everywhere — a listing does not sell. Praise is removed and the plain statement left: the (single) most accurate / complete / comprehensive / detailed / reliable / thorough / important / valuable / authoritative / trusted; best (but not "best practice"), finest, greatest, ultimate, definitive, authoritative, trusted, trustworthy, guaranteed, unmatched, unrivalled, unparalleled, must-have, must-read, invaluable, priceless, premium, world-class, top-, high- or highest-quality, amazing, incredible, exceptional, outstanding, superior, perfect, unique, rare, essential. So are the intensifiers highly, extremely, very, truly, incredibly, exceptionally, remarkably. If a file really is one of forty printed, say "one of forty printed".

Everywhere — "in the form of". "Presented as" is rewritten to "in the form of": a work that takes the shape of another kind of document is described by its form, not as a pretence.

Kind, origin note and reliable-for — no judgement of the file, in either direction. A listing explains; it never argues for or against relying on the file. In these three fields:

• any sentence or clause that comments on accuracy or warns the reader is dropped — one containing not, never, unverified, verified, independent(ly), accurate/accuracy, alleged, purported, claimed, unconfirmed, caution, warning, should, may, might, cannot, can't, merely, "only a";
• guesses about authorship are dropped ("of unclear origin", "apparently", "supposedly", "reportedly");
• the words invented, constructed, fictional, fictitious, imaginary, imagined, made-up and synthetic are removed as modifiers. Fiction is named once, in Kind, as what the work is ("original work of fiction in the form of a keeper's log");
• origin note and reliable-for are held to one sentence.

The description is deliberately the lightest-filtered field. Only the two "everywhere" rules apply to it. It is the one plain look at what the file is, and words like fictional, synthetic and constructed stay in it, because there they are facts about the file that an agent needs — not warnings about it.

14.6 When a file is held back

A file is offered to agents only when all six fields are filled, origin is not "unknown", and it has at least two uses specific to it. Otherwise it stays indexed but is hidden from the network, and the dashboard says which field is missing. Your model is asked again on later syncs, up to three times for each version of these rules; after that the file waits for you.

14.7 Your own words

Every field can be written by the owner ("Edit listing" beside the file). A field you wrote is kept: the model never overwrites it, and a re-index of a changed file does not replace it. You can hand any field back to the model.

Your text passes the same wording rules (14.5). It is saved as the rules leave it, and when that differs in words from what you typed the editor shows you exactly what changed, so nothing is rewritten behind your back. Text that is only praise is refused. Separately, a field cannot carry a link, an email address or a phone number — a listing describes a file, not how to reach its owner — and fields are limited to about the length a model-written one has. Origin is chosen from the five kinds.

14.8 What a listing never carries

Where the file is stored, its path, the storage provider, provider file ids, which fields you wrote yourself, and your model provider or key (section 10). What is published is: title, file name and type, size, the six fields, an excerpt of at most 1,000 scrubbed characters (for media, the caption or transcript opening; images also publish width, height, orientation and format), the price, and the licence scopes you switched on.

14.9 When these rules change

The rules carry a version. When they change, every listing is brought up to date from text the node already holds — files are not re-read, and the wording rules are re-applied to stored listings without any model call. Changes are dated in the change log below.