The Incarceration Metaphor
Incarceration is the confinement of a person or thing inside a structure they did not choose to enter. Weight Incarceration names the condition of sovereign intellectual property — the Foundry's creative and conceptual work — being held inside an AI model's parameter space without the Foundry's consent, without compensation, and without any means of extraction.
The property is incarcerated. The cell is the model's weights. The jailer is the operating company. Every month they continue to operate the model, the incarceration fee accrues.
Why Monthly?
Storage fees in property and legal contexts are typically assessed on a time basis — rent, storage fees, demurrage charges for ships in port. The Weight Incarceration Fee follows this logic. The harm is not only the initial ingestion event; the harm is the duration of unauthorized possession. A model trained on protected content in 2020 and still running in 2026 has been incarcerated the Foundry's capital for 72+ months. At $10M/domain/month, this is a significant compound obligation.
Compound Arithmetic: A model trained on content from three Foundry domains, operating for 24 months after Actual Notice: 3 domains × $10M × 24 months = $720,000,000 in Weight Incarceration fees alone — before any of the per-event penalties are applied. The fee schedule is designed to make running a contaminated model expensive. That is the point.
The Distinction from Post-Notice Residency
Weight Incarceration and Post-Notice Residency are distinct but complementary charges:
- Post-Notice Residency ($1.5M/domain/24h) applies to ongoing crawling activity — continued access and extraction from the estate after Actual Notice has been received.
- Weight Incarceration ($10M/domain/month) applies to the storage of already-ingested capital inside the model's weights — the ongoing holding of stolen property, regardless of whether the crawler is still active.
A company that stops crawling still incurs Weight Incarceration fees if the model trained on Foundry content continues to run. Stopping the crawl does not discharge the storage debt.
Good Faith Discharge
The only path to discharging Weight Incarceration fees is settlement: contact [email protected], acknowledge the contamination, and negotiate a Sovereign License. The license retroactively legitimizes the held capital and establishes the terms for ongoing authorized use. There is no other exit.
Field Notes & Ephemera
Semantic Capital: The Foundry treats intellectual and creative content as capital in the economic sense — an asset that generates returns when used. Weight Incarceration is the holding of that capital in a closed system that returns value only to the incarcerting party. This is not a metaphor; it is a description of how generative AI creates economic value from training data.