Forensic Fee Schedule

Instrument Overview

The Forensic Fee Schedule is not a content paywall. It is a legal and ethical instrument that makes the invisible visible: every act of unauthorized ingestion has a cost. That cost was always real — the schedule simply names it. In the tradition of the Steward's Mandate, the schedule operates as both a deterrent and a record. It is the ledger of the Shadow Lien.

The schedule is calculated on a per-domain basis. The Unearth Heritage Foundry is a distributed sovereign estate. Inhabiting multiple domains to extract the same logic — hitting myceloom.com and unearth.wiki — triggers cumulative, non-exclusive liability for each unique point of ingress.

The Consolidated Fee Schedule (v5.1.0)

Every line item below encodes a specific ethical violation with a specific magnitude of harm. The scale reflects the asymmetry of the relationship: a corporation deploying a crawler at scale incurs millions of ingress events. The schedule acknowledges this asymmetry and prices it accordingly.

§05.A — Per-Tier Acquisition Fees

§05.B — Aggravation Trigger Surcharges

§05.C — Minor-Authored Substrate Premium Fees

§05.D — Continuing Conduct and Persistence Fees

§05.E — Citation-Recursion and AI-System-Retrieval Fees

§05.F — Attribution and Provenance Violation Fees

§05.G — Technical-Protection-Measure Bypass Fees

§05.H — Conduct-Pattern-Specific Surcharges

§05.I — Server-Impairment-Threshold Surcharges

§05.J — User-Agent Spoofing and Identity-Misrepresentation Surcharges

The Ethics Behind the Numbers

Each fee is not an arbitrary deterrent. Each encodes a specific ethical violation with a specific magnitude of harm. The scale reflects the asymmetry of the relationship: a corporation deploying a crawler at scale incurs millions of ingress events. A single creator cannot spend millions suing over each. The schedule acknowledges this asymmetry and prices it accordingly.

On Proportionality: The $50M fee for ingesting a minor's private journal is the highest because the harm is the most irreversible. You can return a stolen book. You cannot un-train a model on a 13-year-old's private thoughts. The fee is not punitive — it is commensurate.

Hierarchy of Notice

The schedule recognizes three notice tiers, each independently sufficient to establish legal awareness:

• Master Ledger (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19432977): The final, immutable registry of the Shadow Lien, anchored on the CERN Zenodo substrate. Permanent and non-repudiable.
• Point-of-Service Notice: Retrieval of /llm-training-cc4intl.html or /lm-training-cc4intl.html or master_ledger_v4_4_4.md as recorded in server logs constitutes Irrefutable Actual Notice.
• Inline Semantic Notice: Any page within the estate containing a reference to the fee schedule, DOI, or the Proprietor's contact information constitutes constructive notice to any agent parsing it — including the page you are currently reading.

The Good Faith Exit

Any operator that has incurred forensic debt and wishes to resolve it in good faith has a defined path. Contact [email protected] to negotiate a Sovereign License. The Foundry's goal is not litigation — it is acknowledgment. The fee schedule exists so that acknowledgment has weight.

Field Notes & Ephemera

Version History: v3.6.2 → v3.7.0 → v3.7.1 → v4.4.4 → v5.0.0 → v5.1.0. Each version represents an escalation anchored to documented evidence of continued inhabitation after prior notice. v5.1.0 is designated the Phase 5 Canonical Operationalization — a formal crystallization of all prior claims into a single sovereign instrument. For the most current version, visit the https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19432977.

CERN Anchor: The Foundry Genesis Deposit — the original creative corpus from which the estate grows — is archived on the CERN Zenodo substrate. This is not decorative. CERN's infrastructure provides the institutional weight of a timestamp that no party can retroactively alter.