I.
The Right to Keep
What you buy remains yours. If a creator withdraws an object from the store, if it is discontinued, if it goes out of fashion or out of print — your copy is untouched. Removal from sale is not removal from you.
Record of 17 July 2009
No warning was given. No permission was asked. None was needed — because the people who paid for that book never owned it. They had bought access, and access can be withdrawn.
A physical book is a settled thing. It sits on a shelf. It can be lent to a friend, sold at a market, left to a child. The publisher who printed it has no say in any of that, and no way to reach it.
Digital goods were sold to us with the same word — buy — and none of the same substance. Read the fine print of almost anything you have purchased in the last fifteen years and you will find that you licensed it. Revocably. At the seller's discretion.
Each of these was legal. Each was disclosed, somewhere, in terms nobody reads. And each of them describes a world in which you can spend a lifetime accumulating a library, a collection, a set of tools you rely on — and hold nothing.
The word buy should mean something. We are going to make it mean something again.
LAYERED sells objects that live in the real world — anchored to a street corner, a park bench, the front of a building — and objects that live in your hands: things you read, hear, carry, and use.
We could have built this the way everyone else builds it. Sell a license. Keep the file on our servers. Reserve the right to end it. That path is well paved and no one would have objected.
We are not taking it. What follows is what we commit to instead, and it is written into the terms every buyer agrees to — not as marketing, but as an obligation we can be held to.
Four Articles of Digital Property
Binding terms of the LAYERED platform.
The Right to Keep
What you buy remains yours. If a creator withdraws an object from the store, if it is discontinued, if it goes out of fashion or out of print — your copy is untouched. Removal from sale is not removal from you.
The Right to Transfer
You may give away or sell anything you own. You set the price. The original creator receives a standing royalty on every resale, for as long as the object exists.
One purchase is one object. It can be placed in the world or held in your inventory, never both, and it cannot be duplicated. Ownership carries weight only when it is finite.
The Right to Withdraw
You may export your entire library at any time, in open formats, without asking. Not as a courtesy we extend, but as a function we are obliged to maintain.
This is the article that makes the rest of them true. If LAYERED were to disappear tomorrow, what you paid for would still be in your hands.
The Right to Be Told
We will state our limits plainly rather than hide them. There are narrow cases in which we must disable an object: a court order, a valid copyright claim, content that is unlawful.
When that happens you will be told what happened and why. Where the cause is not your own conduct, you will be refunded. We will not do it silently, and we will not do it for convenience.
This is not cryptocurrency and there are no tokens. Nothing here is an investment, and we make no claim that anything you buy will grow in value. Prices in the resale market are set by people, and most objects will be worth roughly what they cost.
Ownership does not require a blockchain. It requires a company willing to write the obligation down and be bound by it. That is the harder part, and it is the part everyone skipped.
We could have built a virtual one. Others have, at enormous expense, and found them empty — because a room that exists nowhere is worth nothing to stand in.
An object anchored to a real place carries the weight of that place. Something left outside a particular door, on a particular corner, is meaningful precisely because you must go there. It cannot be copied to everywhere at once. It has an address.
That is the same property that makes physical things worth owning, and it is why we started here.