a folio of license-and-rights primitives
an annotated, hand-tinted field guide to the eleven instruments by which intellectual property is granted, withheld, transferred, and recovered — pinned to parchment, drifted across by aurora.
— the curator was here at dawn see plate v. for the original taxonomy.The smallest grant possible — a single permission, indivisible. A License Atom binds one work, one right, one party, for one duration. It cannot be split without becoming two Atoms; it cannot be merged without dissolving entirely. Most contracts in the corpus are a tied bouquet of Atoms in a hand. The Atom remembers the day it was struck, even after the ink has dried into the parchment.
A pre-emption: the holder is offered the work first, on the terms a third party would have accepted. If declined, the offer passes on. The Right of Refusal is a brass scale on the page — nothing weighed yet, but ready.
A perpetual, unwaivable mark: every downstream copy must carry the maker's name. The Stamp is the oldest of the moral instruments in this folio — older than copyright itself, older than the printing press by some accounts. It survives translation, abridgement, transliteration, and even the death of the work; only the destruction of every copy can dissolve it. In a watercolor folio one would render it as a wet thumbprint pressed to the lower-right corner.
A grant that contemplates its own descendants: the licensee may produce derivative works, and those works carry the same Bloom forward, recursively, until a terminating clause. The result is a pigment that spreads across many pages — a single Bloom, decades later, can be the source-color of a thousand related entries.
The commons. A region where every Atom is dissolved and every Bloom is exhausted. Works enter the Field by expiration, by dedication, or by the failure of any holder to defend them. Once a work is in the Field it cannot be retrieved — the parchment has accepted it. The Field is rendered here as a wide, slightly cooler watercolor wash with no outline at all.
A chain of provenance from grantor to current holder. Each handover is a knot in a notarial ribbon-bow; the ribbon may be unwound to audit the chain, but cannot be re-tied without the consent of every prior knot.
The condition under which a granted right returns to its original holder. Reversion is triggered by failure-of-exploitation, by a fixed date, by the death of a key person, or by mutual recall. The Clause is rendered as a sealed envelope — it can only be opened once, and only the original sender holds the seal-knife.
A bundle of inalienable interests — integrity, attribution, withdrawal, association — that travel with the maker, not the work. The Ribbon ties around every License Atom struck by that maker, and stays tied even after the Atom is sold.
A grant that the law itself strikes — the holder cannot refuse, but is owed a statutory royalty. The Compulsory License is rendered as a hand-cranked telegraph key: the message goes through whether the operator likes it or not.
The periodic settling-up between licensee and licensor. A Wave rises with each accounting period and crests at remittance; in the gulfs between, it is only a memorandum on parchment. The shape of the Wave — flat fee, percentage, escalator, stepped — is the most-bargained variable in the entire folio.
The instrument by which a grant ends. Some terminations are written into the License Atom from the day it was struck; others arrive later, by Reversion or by entry into the Public-Domain Field. A few are sundials proper — the gnomon's shadow lengthens until the grant simply runs out of light. The folio closes with the Sundial because every other plate eventually points back to it.