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Generativity Governance of Open Knowledge Propagation: A Preliminary Discussion of Events, Relations, and Conditions under Nonlinear and Multi-Entity Causation

Year: 2026
Type: report
Abstract: Once a body of knowledge enters an open commons it propagates through a system of many heterogeneous participants, in which copies are modified, recombined, implemented, automated, commercialised and redeployed, and in which the conditions of further propagation are altered by the propagation itself. Where harm eventually appears in such a system, the reconstruction of a complete causal history is frequently unavailable, and the legal apparatus of attribution, which requires an antecedent subject, an acyclic chain, a datable injury and a proportionate contribution, is correspondingly difficult to apply. This paper asks what governance remains possible when complete causal reconstruction is unavailable, and what form it should take so that it neither waits for a proof it cannot obtain nor suppresses the propagation it exists to protect. The answer developed here places three objects under governance in place of one. Events supply observable points at which duties may attach, records may be created and interventions may occur. Relations supply the structure through which a local disturbance is amplified or damped, and which determines whether an event has consequences at all. Conditions supply the settings, defaults, terms and incentives under which further generation proceeds, and they operate on whole populations at once where an event duty operates on a single act. The paper defines generativity governance as the governance of these three, and states at the outset that the term names an object of governance and never an objective of maximisation. The framework's instruments are matched to its objects. Event duties take the form of requirement sets attaching to classes of consequential transformation, with capability transformation identified as the class that existing law, whose triggers are largely transactional, does not reach. Relational duties are supervisory and bound amplification in place of adjudicating contributions. Condition duties are structural and operate through defaults, terms and infrastructure. A provenance ledger is examined as evidence infrastructure, together with the two limits that govern its use: the schema of recordable events is itself chosen by an interested party, and the population a voluntary ledger reaches is correlated with willingness to comply. Post-hoc attribution is retained as a backstop for deliberate misconduct and clear negligence, and is shown to be admissible at an event only as compliance with the requirements in force there, never as a share of a distant outcome.
DOI: 10.17613/7tbzf-ggk96
Language: English
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7203868809
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