ENTITY: the identity, rights and economic relationship system
What ENTITY is
ENTITY gives a durable identity to people, organizations, software capabilities, datasets, inventions and related economic rights. It records the relationships that matter when knowledge moves between systems. A DataChip may travel from one cloud service to another while remaining the same underlying version. A researcher may grant a manufacturer permission to run it for a limited purpose. A contributor may be entitled to part of a particular commercial revenue stream. ENTITY is designed to preserve and verify these distinctions.
Imagine a land registry combined with a library catalogue and a permissions desk. The catalogue identifies an item. The permissions desk determines who is allowed to use it and in what way. The registry preserves claims and supporting documents. But the office does not become the law itself: if a legal title is disputed, contracts, legislation and relevant authorities must decide the outcome.
Provenance: knowing where something came from
Provenance means the origin and history of an item. In BTG, an asset record can point to its original research project, source data, code version, parent DataChips, test evidence and contributing organizations. Provenance answers, 'Where did this come from?' rather than merely, 'What is this file called?'
A cryptographic fingerprint can establish that two versions of a file contain the same bytes. A digital signature can establish which key signed a statement. Neither is automatic proof that the signer owns the copyright, has the right to sell the dataset or can issue shares. ENTITY therefore distinguishes a technical claim from documentary legal authority and recognizes conflicts, expiring permissions and revocations.
Rights Passports
A Rights Passport is a readable and machine-verifiable description of what permissions are associated with an asset. It might say that a buyer may execute a particular algorithm for one year, only inside its manufacturing systems, with no permission to download underlying private data, modify the original source or sublicense it. Another agreement might allow research use but forbid commercial use. An assignment of intellectual property, a commercial licence and a share in a company have different legal meanings; a generic 'owner' label cannot replace those meanings.
Before a protected action takes place, a participating service checks the relevant rights, identity, time period, purpose, version and restrictions. If an entitlement expires or is lawfully revoked, a new unauthorized action should be blocked. The historical audit remains available as law permits so parties can determine what happened when a contract was still active.
Contributor relationships and sovereignty
ENTITY also relates assets to their creators and contributing sources. The system can represent multiple parent assets, companies, researchers, data contributors and agreed allocations of commercial proceeds. It can identify that a derived invention depended on a particular licensed dataset without automatically asserting that every source contributor owns the derived invention. Contributions and economic entitlements are established under actual agreements.
Organizations and Indigenous Nations may have distinct data-governance requirements, and some information is not appropriate for commercialization at all. The system is designed to enforce purpose and jurisdiction boundaries rather than treating everything that can be copied as freely transferable.
Why ENTITY matters beyond a single BTG service
An important distinction is portability. If the asset, its right and its evidence are legible only inside one company's private database, participants depend entirely on that company. ENTITY's role within the wider architecture is to support interoperable verification so legitimate rights can remain meaningful as assets are reused by different applications, farms and commercial partners. Its design is not to impose an automatic fee on every unrelated party merely because an asset has an ENTITY record. Service fees and ownership income must come from the appropriate contracts.