Rights Passport API
A Rights Passport carries machine-verifiable claims about rights, restrictions, controllers, issuers, provenance and evidence. It is designed to make rights portable without pretending that the protocol itself creates legal title.
What belongs in a rights object
A practical rights record should identify the governed object, issuer/authority, controller or holder, scope, permitted actions, restrictions, jurisdiction/profile context, effective/expiry conditions, provenance/evidence references, transferability or delegation rules, and the signatures that authorize the record.
Rights are not possession
Hosting bytes, possessing a file, running a node or controlling a database does not automatically confer a RIGHT. Rights must arise from the authoritative source/terms represented by the record and its evidence.
Non-rival data
Because data can be copied without depriving the source holder of identical bytes, ENTITY models scarce economic objects primarily as rights and entitlements: access, use, training, derivation, redistribution, exclusivity, duration, quantity, jurisdiction, capacity or revenue participation.
Lifecycle
A transfer or delegation must not silently broaden scope. A downstream derivative should retain the relevant source/provenance links and only carry economic participation when explicit signed terms require it.
Failure conditions
- Unknown or invalid issuer authority.
- Expired/revoked rights.
- Missing object/provenance reference.
- Scope escalation during delegation.
- Transfer attempted where the right is non-transferable.
- Usage beyond quantity/time/jurisdiction constraints.
- Economic participation inferred from topology rather than explicit terms.
Integration rule
Applications should evaluate the Rights Passport before acting, record the resulting EVENT, and only create VALUE state when the required settlement or economic evidence exists.