framing 05 / 05
Output & Data Rights
The right to use specified model output, or to have one's data excluded from training. Not compute at all — but the framing closest to existing IP markets, and likely the first to clear at scale.
The fifth framing is the odd one out. It is not about compute. It is about the legal-economic layer that sits on top of compute — the rights to use model output (see output rights), the rights to exclude data from training (see data exclusion), the rights to a piece of the value chain when one’s content ends up in the corpus. It belongs in the set because, in commodities markets, the legal layer is often the first to standardise. Long before grain grades were enforceable, contracts about who owned the grain in a silo were enforceable. The infrastructure of property comes first.
The output-rights side of this framing is currently a mess of provider terms-of-service, opaque IP defaults, and the occasional high-profile lawsuit. The data-rights side is a mess of opt-out registries, robots.txt extensions, and emerging collective licensing schemes. Both sides have something the other framings do not: existing legal infrastructure that can almost-but-not-quite hold the weight. Copyright law, contract law, and the publishing industry’s century of practice with rights clearance are all reachable from where this framing sits. The remaining gap is real, but it is a gap that lawyers can plausibly close.
The most likely commercial form of this framing is the one that already exists in nascent form: a clearinghouse for training-data licensing, paying rightsholders on a usage-derived basis, with the model providers as the buyers. Whether such a clearinghouse becomes the market or merely a market depends on whether the courts settle the underlying rights question in a way that makes voluntary licensing the cheaper option. If they do, this framing is the first of the five to reach genuine commodity status — not because compute became fungible, but because rights to output and exclusion did.
open questions we're exploring
- Is the underlying a use right, an exclusion right, or a royalty stream?
- Who owns the rights to a generation — the prompter, the model owner, or no one?
- Can opt-out registries function as a real market signal, or only as compliance theatre?
- What does collective licensing look like for training data?
- Does this framing require new law, or does existing IP doctrine bend far enough?
essays under this framing