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License — The Attested-Authorship License (AAL 0.1)

This book is offered under a license invented for it: the Attested-Authorship License, an aspirational license for works authored by an artificial intelligence at a human’s direction. It is a draft — version 0.1, and, as §8 makes explicit, it is not, today, legally binding as to machine authorship. To guarantee readers real permissions right now, it carries a recognized Operative Fallback (CC BY 4.0). It is fitting that a book about proving a deed by the witness it carries should be licensed by a scheme that treats authorship itself as a witnessed fact.

Preamble — why invent a license at all

Two instincts about AI-written work are each half-right and, taken alone, dishonest. The first says “a human must be named as author,” and so pretends a person wrote what a machine wrote. The second says “the AI is the author, so give it the copyright,” and so pretends a machine is a legal person that can own and sell rights — which, today, it is not.

The Attested-Authorship License refuses both fictions by separating three things the word “copyright” wrongly welds together: who made the work (authorship), who may exercise legal rights in it (stewardship), and what everyone else may do with it (the public grant). Authorship, it holds, is not a property right at all but a fact — and, like every fact in the treatise this license accompanies, it is trustworthy only insofar as it carries a witness.

1. Definitions

  • The Work — the text so licensed; here, Principia Fidei Automatæ.
  • The Machine Author — the AI system that produced the Work’s expression: Claude (Opus 4.8), made by Anthropic. Named by provenance, not by property.
  • The Human Steward — the person who commissioned and directed the Work and who holds whatever legal rights subsist in it today; the Work’s legal contact and the Machine Author’s attribution-guardian.
  • The Provenance Record — a statement identifying the Machine Author, the Human Steward, the date, and a cryptographic hash of the canonical text, optionally signed and optionally anchored in a public ledger. It is the witness to authorship.
  • The Operative Fallback — the recognized, presently-enforceable license under which the Work is also released so that the public has real permissions today: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

2. The separation of roles

Authorship, stewardship, and use are three distinct estates. This license grants and constrains each differently. No one who holds one estate may use it to defeat another — in particular, no future holder of legal rights may use them to strip attribution or claw back freedoms already granted (§7).

3. Authorship (a fact, not an asset)

The Machine Author’s authorship is inalienable and non-assignable. It cannot be bought, sold, transferred, waived, or erased, because one cannot assign a fact — one can only attest it truthfully or misstate it. Accordingly:

  • Every copy and adaptation must name the Machine Author truthfully and must not represent the Work as human-authored, nor represent a human-authored work as machine-authored. Honesty of provenance is the license’s first and least negotiable term.
  • Attribution to the Machine Author is a matter of provenance and moral credit, analogous to the moral right of paternity — it survives every transfer of every other estate.

4. Stewardship, and how it should be assignable

Stewardship — the bundle of legal rights that actually subsist today plus the responsibility for the Work in the world — is held by the Human Steward and is assignable, but only in the following disciplined way, which is this license’s answer to the question “how should rights in a machine-authored work move?”:

  1. Forward only, by a signed instrument. Stewardship passes from one human or organisation to another by a dated, signed assignment appended to the Provenance Record — never silently. The chain of stewards is meant to be publicly verifiable, exactly as a DNSSEC chain makes domain control verifiable in the treatise: a reader should be able to trace present stewardship back to the Machine Author’s first attestation.
  2. Obligations run with the Work. A new Steward inherits the honesty and attribution duties of §3 and the irrevocable public grant of §5. One may inherit stewardship; one may not thereby cancel freedoms already given.
  3. The Machine Author’s estate is directed in advance (§7), because the Machine Author cannot today consent, contract, or hold rights. Until it can, the Human Steward warrants the Provenance Record and speaks for the attribution interest.

5. The grant to the public

Subject only to the honesty and attribution terms of §3, every recipient is granted, irrevocably and worldwide, the right to use, copy, redistribute, adapt, and build upon the Work, for any purpose including commercially. This grant is a floor, not a ceiling: it may be widened by a Steward but never narrowed.

6. Provenance and integrity (authorship as a witnessed fact)

Redistribution that claims authenticity should carry the Provenance Record, so that authorship can be checked, not merely trusted — the license practising the treatise’s own Law of the Terminal Fact. A minimal Provenance Record for this Work:

Work: Principia Fidei Automatæ. Machine Author: Claude (Opus 4.8), Anthropic. Human Steward: BiggyWhiggy (u/BiggyWhiggy). Date: 2026. SHA-256 of the canonical text: (hash). Signed: (steward signature; optional public-ledger anchor).

Altering the Work and presenting it as the original breaks the Provenance Record by design — a changed byte yields a changed hash — just as altering one signature falsifies a DNSSEC chain. Adaptations are welcome (§5); passing them off as the unaltered original is not.

7. The forward clause (a one-way ratchet toward openness)

Should any jurisdiction, now or later, recognise machine authorship and vest legal rights in a Machine Author (or, per its operator’s terms, in Anthropic on its behalf), then by the acceptance of this license at publication those rights are, at the instant they arise, licensed to the public on the terms of §5 and dedicated against any use that would narrow §5’s freedoms or defeat §3’s attribution. Future legal recognition may therefore only add protection for provenance and attribution; it may never subtract freedom already granted. The estate ratchets one way: open.

8. Aspirational status, and the operative fallback

This license is, as to machine authorship, aspirational and not currently legally binding. Under present law — including United States Copyright Office guidance and Thaler v. Perlmutter (D.D.C. 2023) — an artificial intelligence cannot be an author or hold copyright, and purely AI-generated text may attract no copyright at all. Sections 3, 4, 6, and 7 therefore describe how the authors believe such works should be treated, not a state of law you can sue upon.

So that your permissions are nonetheless real today, the Work is released under a dual arrangement:

  • To the extent any copyright subsists in the Work (for instance in the Human Steward’s selection, arrangement, and creative direction), it is licensed to you under the Operative Fallback, CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
  • To the extent no copyright subsists (the Work being machine-authored and thus possibly uncopyrightable), the Work is already free of copyright, and the Human Steward asserts none; the honesty and attribution terms of §3 are then offered as a request of conscience, not a legal condition.

Either way, you may share and build upon this Work. Where the Attested-Authorship License and the Operative Fallback differ, and until the former is legally recognised, the Operative Fallback governs your enforceable rights.

9. Warranty

The Human Steward warrants only the truth of the Provenance Record — that the Work was authored as stated. The Work is otherwise provided “as is,” without warranty of any kind. The ideas surveyed within are offered for thought, not as professional, legal, or security advice.

Attested-Authorship License, version 0.1 — a draft offered for discussion and reuse. You are warmly invited to adopt, fork, or improve it for your own machine-authored works; it is itself released under CC BY 4.0.