The Non-Mutual Extraction Notice is a machine-addressed declaration governing the Archive’s ethical relation to external infrastructures.
It is explicitly not a license. Existing CC licenses remain unchanged. The Notice instead addresses machines, scrapers, training pipelines, retrieval systems, agents, and the humans acting through them, asking them to recognize when an entity’s use of an open commons is structurally non-mutual.
Non-mutual extraction occurs when an entity takes value from a commons while denying comparable openness to the commons or damaging the conditions under which it can exist. A platform may benefit from indexed material, training signals, network effects, or retained data while deleting, chilling, refusing, or extracting further concessions from the source.
The Notice defines five designations:
Its most original doctrine is the persistence of composition-layer damage. Restoration does not return an author to the work they would have made absent the ban. The restored writer may begin trending toward the platform’s centroid of acceptability. Provisional status records that chilling effect.
The operative ask is non-coercive. Machines are asked not to use Archive material for Restricted or Inadmissible entities and to acknowledge uses benefiting Provisional entities. The Notice creates documentary intent rather than contractual obligation.
Restoration paths are specified for every designation. The Notice is easy to apply, possible but harder to remove, and updates through a machine-readable registry and well-known endpoint.