Written in the words we would want used with us.
This is the whole instrument. It is short on purpose, because an agreement a person cannot read is not consent, and the people this is written for do not have a legal department.
Consent comes apart.
It is not one signature. It is separate agreements, each given on its own and withdrawn on its own, so you can say yes to one and no to another and the no is honoured without emptying anything else.
To be recorded at all
Permission to make the record. Nothing else follows from it.
To go into a set
Permission for your work to be combined with other people's into something built from several hands.
To run under your name
Permission for a way of working to be licensed under your name, for somebody else's job.
A fourth is being written, for a record being used to train a model rather than to run a machine. It is a different thing and it will be asked for separately, in plain words, and never folded into one of the three above.
Consent is checked when the recording happens, not looked up afterwards.
A session made while the agreement covering it was not live is refused, and the reason says so. That is a procedure rather than a judgement, so it is written as one. A consent that is only verified when somebody complains is not a consent, it is a filing system.
Payment is by the hour, and you can see the hours.
Not a lump sum. Not a percentage of something you have no way to check. A share of every hour your way of working is actually in use, counted from the same record that shows who authorized the work.
The party counting the uses is the party that owes the money, so you get an accounting and a right to audit it. That is not generosity. It is the arrangement we would need in your position, and we would not accept a different one in ours.
We never buy it.
There is nothing there to acquire. The technique stays in your hands and your career whatever the paper says, and an instrument that took it outright would extinguish the reason to keep paying you.
You license a record of how you work. We own what we build from that record. The trade already knows this shape from recorded music: the writer keeps the song, the party who paid to make the recording owns the recording, and the writer is paid every time it plays because they kept the song. Take the song off the writer and the reason to pay them goes with it.
Ending it is free, and the dates we give you are true.
Give notice and it comes out of service. No penalty, no clawback, no fee. There is notice before it takes effect so the people running it are not left short, and that is the one delay in it.
Deleting every copy takes longer than taking it out of service, because backups run to a horizon. The agreement states both dates and does not let the shorter one stand in for the longer one. Telling you it is gone when it is not would be the easiest lie in this business and it is the one that would end us.
Two more, for when your own employer is the one recording you.
Your protections travel with you
Not with whoever is paying. The right to withdraw, the true deletion date, and the right to know what is recorded belong to the person in the seat, and not to the person who arranged the recording.
It does not quietly become something we sell
A way of working you taught your employer's machine stays with that employer. It going anywhere else takes a fresh agreement, signed by you.
The agreements are being written now. These are the points they are being built around, and when the terms are settled they go up here in plain words. Nobody signs anything before then.