Licensing data

A scraped corpus can't say who agreed to it, and that is usually the first question a regulator or a plaintiff asks. Buying from a broker moves the liability without answering the question, because the broker's warranty is a document you can't check against a ledger.

What a licence is here

A licence is a consent receipt that names you as the buyer, identifies the data by its hash, and states the purpose you agreed to and the date the permission ends. That gives you:

• Provenance. Every record traces back to a person who agreed to it.
• A stated purpose, written into the receipt.
• An expiry. Consent ends by default, and renewing it takes a new grant.

Checking a receipt yourself

Call is_valid on the contract from any funded key. You don't need an account or an API key from us. See consent receipts for the exact call.

Buying

The catalogue filters by source, format, size, freshness and how long the consent has left to run. You pay for a basket with one signature, in XLM or USDC, into the payout contract that contributors claim from. We re-read every receipt on-chain before writing a licence, and again on every download, so a withdrawal stops the next delivery one ledger close after it lands.

Before you pay, checkout tells you what a withdrawal would mean. A contributor can withdraw before the end date, and your access ends when they do. Files you have already downloaded can't be recalled, and the licence terms govern them from then on. Today there is no refund when a contributor withdraws, and checkout says so.

A licence contract that changes this is written and tested but not deployed. With it, your payment is held for a short period (planned at 7 days, or until the receipt's end date if sooner) before it reaches the contributor. If they withdraw during the hold, you get back the share of the price for the unused term, and checkout shows how much a withdrawal tomorrow would refund. A withdrawal after the hold refunds nothing.

This runs on Stellar testnet. Two things are not built yet: a cohort builder for commissioning data that doesn't exist yet, and a streaming API. If you want either, tell us which cohort and what you would pay, on Telegram at @humanthe or by email at support@datavar.xyz.