Source Registry

The Source Registry answers four questions about every source, and it separates two of them that are routinely collapsed: what the source is and what this tenant may do with it [D] (data-plane.source-registry, S4).

• A global source record describes the source: coverage, jurisdiction, issuer class, reachability, cost band, and the licence terms as published.
• A per-tenant entitlement record describes the contract: what this customer has actually bought, for which purposes, with which retention and which redistribution rights.

Collapsing the two produces the most expensive assumption in the corpus — that being able to reach a source is the same as being entitled to use it [A].

What the registry records, and what it refuses to

No prices. Not one amount appears in the source landscape record. A cost band is an ordinal judgement of a commercial category, and the validator fails the build on any amount lacking a verified date and a source URL [A].

No entitlements. The entitlement array is empty and the validator enforces it. No contract has been signed; a populated array would be both a fabrication and a leak of commercial terms [A].

No implemented or verified status. Nothing has run [D] (data-plane.source-registry, S4).

No inference from "the API responded." A working key is evidence of reachability and of nothing else [A].

Licence classes, and the four structural traps

The landscape survey behind this specification covers 147 unique sources across eleven verticals, of which 20 are a deliberately negotiation-free starter set [E]. What the survey established is less a list than four repeating traps [A]:

1. The non-commercial trap — complete, free, and unusable. A default licence of attribution-non-commercial makes a source that looks free a source that requires a paid agreement for any product that earns revenue.
2. The metadata/content split — the index is open and the thing you want is not. Metadata under a permissive dedication, full text under the author's or publisher's copyright, is the normal shape rather than the exception.
3. The exchange-licensed layer — paying the vendor is not the licence. Venue-level redistribution licensing runs on a three-to-six-month timescale and sits above the vendor contract.
4. Sources die — and a registry that cannot record a withdrawal accumulates lies. Two sources in the surveyed set have already been shut down by their vendors.

Why the starter set is chosen for absence of negotiation

Seventeen of the twenty starter sources are free at the point of use. That is the selection rule, not a coincidence: a negotiation is a three-to-six-month dependency on a party with no reason to hurry, and a first slice whose critical path runs through a procurement department is not a first slice [A].