Protocol
Governance
A resolver without trusted governance is only a polished claim page. This page answers the questions directly.
Who does what
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who can create a record? | Any conforming node, under the published conformance rules below. |
| Who can host a node? | Any party that meets the conformance requirements. Linseed may operate a reference node; it is one node among many, not the exclusive registry. |
| Who can challenge a record? | Any party with standing: the named rights holder, a national authority, or a documented interested party. |
| Who investigates challenges? | The recording node in the first instance, through its published correction procedure; escalation to an independent reviewer is part of the PRA-reviewed tier. |
| Who resolves a dispute the node's own procedure cannot settle? | Parties may appoint their own legal counsel. Unresolved disputes may be referred to mediation or arbitration through the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, or a competent regional or national body. A PRA node is not an adjudicator and does not bear responsibility for that resolution. |
| Can records be deleted? | No. Correction happens through supersession and status events, never erasure. |
| How are historical versions preserved? | Every status change is appended to the record's history, which stays visible alongside the current status. |
| What happens if a node closes? | The protocol and record format are published and open, so any conforming party may run a mirror. A single node's disappearance should not make a record unrecoverable if mirrors exist. |
| How are conflicts between national systems shown? | Conflicting records are displayed side by side with their evidence and authority fields, not silently resolved by one operator. |
| What makes an implementation conformant? | See the conformance tiers below. Conformance and record authority are separate dimensions. |
Conformance tiers
Do not use the word "certified" for any of these unless a real, named certification process stands behind it. PRA defines three implementation-conformance tiers:
| Implementation conformance | Meaning |
|---|---|
| PRA-compatible | Uses one or more PRA concepts without meeting the full specification. |
| PRA-conformant | Meets the published minimum fields, identifier rules, human-readable and machine-readable representations, status-history requirements, correction procedure, and challenge mechanism. |
| PRA-reviewed | Independently assessed against the specification by a named reviewer or institution. |
Record authority is a separate axis, describing a record's relationship to an official body rather than whether an implementation meets the PRA specification:
| Record authority status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Self-declared | Published by the recording party without independent institutional review. |
| Institutionally reviewed | Reviewed by a named institution. |
| Authority-recorded | Linked to a government, court, statutory body, or other identified official record. |
| Authority-issued | The named authority itself issued the underlying licence or decision. |
Do not use "Official PRA," "PRA-certified," "PRA-approved," or "PRA-cleared" for any implementation unless a genuine certification body and published criteria exist.
What governance does not do
- It does not make any node the legal authority over a work. That authority sits with national law, courts, and statutory bodies, never with a PRA node.
- It does not let one node invalidate another node's record. Disagreement is shown, not silently overwritten.
- It does not certify legal correctness by the act of recording. See the canonical evidence fields for how a record signals evidence source, review status, authority status, and challenge status separately, rather than as one collapsed score.
See also the marks and status vocabulary, the verso and resolver model, and the note on the Google Books Settlement, which is the precedent this governance model is built to avoid repeating.
Working group and pilot
This proposal is currently a single-author draft. The next step is twofold, not sequential: convene a PRA Working Group, open to participants such as a cataloguer from a national library, an intellectual-property lawyer, a library and information science academic, and a heritage or trade publisher, and run a functioning pilot of the record model against real books and real users (see the framework paper's pilot design). The record schema will be published under a permissive open licence (for example CC0 or MIT) in a public repository, so the specification belongs to that working group and pilot, not to one person or one company.