The Politics of a Legacy

Politics before law

The politics of a legacy begins before a lawsuit and beyond the state. It appears whenever one person or institution can decide what another may see, quote, reproduce, edit, translate, sell, or withhold. Heirs, executors, libraries, publishers, scholars, website maintainers, correspondents, photographers, and readers occupy different positions in that field. Their interests can overlap without becoming identical. Preservation favors stable custody; scholarship favors access; privacy can require delay; a publisher needs an exploitable text; an author may have demanded silence.

Grothendieck makes those tensions unusually visible because he did not leave a simple public posture toward his works. He circulated enormous texts while refusing ordinary publication. He entrusted papers to a former student, made testamentary provisions for later manuscripts, and also issued a severe declaration against publication and republication. Some texts traveled in copies for years; some entered formal editions after his death; some remain chiefly archival. To convert this history into either “he wanted everything destroyed” or “he gave everything to humanity” would require discarding documents that complicate the chosen sentence.

The political unit is therefore not “the legacy” in the singular. It is each work, letter, scan, photograph, edition, and archival series, with its own history of disclosure and custody. The status of Récoltes et Semailles cannot simply be transferred to Réflexions sur la Vie et le Cosmos. Permission to consult a manuscript cannot be transferred to permission to print its image. Grothendieck’s rights in his words do not settle a correspondent’s rights or a living person’s privacy. A national library’s possession of paper does not make the text public domain.

The one-page declaration

On January 3, 2010, Grothendieck signed a one-page Déclaration d’intention de non-publication. The document opposes further circulation of writings attributed to him and expressly includes scientific and personal material, letters, excerpts, electronic distribution, and translations. It also condemns editions made without his consent and requests withdrawal of publications reproducing material beyond brief quotation. The declaration thus joined a broad refusal of circulation to an explicitly enumerated range of formats, while leaving its later legal operation to documents beyond the page itself. 11Grothendieck, “Déclaration d’intention de non-publication,” 1.

No ethical history of the posthumous editions can omit that page. No accurate history can quote it selectively. The second sentence characterizes unauthorized future dissemination, contrary to his express will, as illicit from the author’s perspective; it also limits that clause to his lifetime. The temporal qualification does not cancel the opening refusal. It does prevent a biographer from silently rewriting the document as an unqualified posthumous instruction. Read together, the two clauses show objection and a temporal boundary. 22Grothendieck, “Déclaration d’intention de non-publication,” 1.

The document’s title deserves its full weight and no more: it records an authorial intention in a signed text. The sources consulted do not establish whether it entered a will, reached every relevant rights holder, was superseded, or received judicial interpretation. The 2023 BnF accession separately establishes that a corpus was partly bequeathed by Grothendieck and completed by his children’s gift. That transfer supports preservation; without its legal terms, it does not establish permission to publish any particular work. 33Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Les manuscrits du mathématicien Alexandre Grothendieck entrent à la BnF,” 1–2; Grothendieck, “Déclaration d’intention de non-publication,” 1; Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Les manuscrits du mathématicien Alexandre Grothendieck entrent à la BnF”.

Ethical force and legal effect remain different questions. The declaration establishes that Grothendieck objected in 2010 to specified forms of dissemination; it does not, by itself, establish the posthumous legal status of every work. The chapter therefore states the objection, paraphrases rather than republishes unreviewed language, and leaves wills, contracts, disclosure history, statutory succession, and work-specific permissions to independent French legal review. 44Code de la propriété intellectuelle, art. L121-1; Code de la propriété intellectuelle, art. L121-2; Grothendieck, “Déclaration d’intention de non-publication,” 1.

Four different things called ownership

The first ownership is ownership of the physical object. A library can hold a manuscript leaf, preserve it, assign a shelfmark, and regulate handling. The second is economic copyright: the exclusive right, subject to exceptions, to reproduce and communicate the work. The third is moral right, including respect for name and integrity and the special problem of disclosure. The fourth is a looser cultural claim of communal possession. Only the first three have determinate legal structures, and they do not necessarily belong to the same actor. The fourth can motivate preservation and also conceal appropriation.

French law supplies general principles, not an automatic answer to the Grothendieck file. Article L121-1 states that an author enjoys the right to respect for name, status, and work; it describes that right as attached to the person, perpetual, inalienable, imprescriptible, and transmissible on death. Article L121-2 addresses the author’s right of disclosure and orders its posthumous exercise through a testamentary executor and, in default or later, specified successors, while preserving the relevance of a contrary authorial will. The application of those provisions depends on facts this chapter does not possess. 55Code de la propriété intellectuelle, art. L121-1; Code de la propriété intellectuelle, art. L121-2.

Article L123-1 gives the ordinary economic term as the author’s life, the remaining calendar year, and seventy following years, subject to the rest of the code. Grothendieck’s writings are therefore not treated here as public domain merely because he died in 2014. Article L122-5 allows certain analyses and short quotations from a disclosed work when the author and source are clearly indicated and the use is justified by critical, polemical, pedagogical, scientific, or informational character. “Short” and “justified” are contextual requirements, not a page quota a biographer may spend at will. 66Code de la propriété intellectuelle, art. L122-5; Code de la propriété intellectuelle, art. L123-1.

This legal map also explains why a scan creates no simple freedom. The manuscript text may be protected. The photograph or digital surrogate may have terms of use. A letter can include another person’s protected expression and private information. An editor’s transcription and scholarly apparatus may add protectable choices. A translation is a new work dependent on the original. A book jacket and event photograph have their own creators. Proper source credit is necessary and may still be insufficient.

What the BnF asks a reproducer to do

The BnF’s public guidance turns those abstractions into procedure. For protected works, it tells a person seeking reproduction to obtain authorization from authors or rights holders so that the library can proceed. It distinguishes payments due to rights holders from any fee for commercial use of a BnF reproduction. A separate page distinguishes the technical purchase of a reproduction from the proposed use and explains the library’s treatment of commercial and non-commercial projects. 77Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Reproduire une œuvre protégée au titre du droit d’auteur”; Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Reproduction des documents”.

These pages do not decide whether every use in this internal biography requires the same form. They establish a discipline: identify the object and the intended use, ask the institution, identify the rights holder, and preserve written responses. Image cards must therefore record scope and edition rather than only the word “approved.”

A photographed manuscript produces a chain. The holding institution supplies the shelfmark. The author or successor controls relevant rights in the text. A photographer may control the new image. The library may regulate the high-resolution file and its commercial reuse. A designer may crop the page into a panel. A caption must identify enough of that chain for readers to find the object again. If any link remains unknown, an original explanatory diagram is safer than a decorative facsimile.

The distinction is not bureaucratic fuss around an essentially free idea. Material form affects meaning. A crop can remove cancellation marks. Contrast enhancement can turn pencil uncertainty into black certainty. A photograph can imply that a page is representative when it is exceptional. A rights request forces the editor to specify which leaf matters and why. Good permissions work can improve scholarship because it makes the intended claim concrete.

The 2022 edition

In January 2022 Gallimard published Récoltes et Semailles in two volumes. IHES supported what it describes as meticulous transcription and layout and participated in public presentation of the books. The edition gave readers a stable commercial object in place of a long history of private copies and online files. It also made the politics of editing more visible: the selected text, included additions, treatment of repetitions and variants, and accompanying apparatus. 88Grothendieck, Récoltes et semailles; Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, “Publication of *Récoltes Et Semailles* by Alexander Grothendieck,” 2022, https://www.ihes.fr/en/publication-recoltes-et-semailles-grothendieck/.

The sources establish that Gallimard issued the edition, that IHES supported transcription and layout, and that public events accompanied publication. They do not reproduce the authorization chain. The chapter therefore calls the edition neither unauthorized nor fully cleared; authorization remains unknown until a contract or explicit rights-holder statement is independently checked. Commercial appearance, institutional support, and legal permission are recorded as three different propositions. 99Grothendieck, Récoltes et semailles; Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, “Publication of *Récoltes Et Semailles* by Alexander Grothendieck”; Centre for Grothendieckian Studies, “*La Clef Des Songes* Published by Éditions Du Sandre”.

This boundary distinguishes evidence from legal conclusion. It states what each opened source establishes, marks authorization as unknown where records are absent, and excludes quotation and imagery whose rights are not settled. A full rights study would have to compare the declaration, wills or transfer terms, publisher records, French statutory provisions, privacy interests, and the precise use proposed for every work. No inference crosses from publication fact to permission status without support.

Pierre Schapira’s signed review raises a different issue. He calls the edition a truncated manuscript and argues that important additions, in which Grothendieck revised some assertions, were not incorporated. Schapira also disputes parts of Grothendieck’s account of mathematical credit and community ethics. These criticisms matter because editorial selection can change the balance of a polemical autobiography. They remain Schapira’s arguments, not a judicial verdict on the edition or a unanimous historical conclusion. 1010Schapira, “A Truncated Manuscript”.

The episode demonstrates why “complete” must have an object. An edition can be complete according to a chosen base typescript while excluding later notes. It can include all pages and omit physical variants. It can reproduce every word and still lack correspondence needed to assess allegations. A book of nearly two thousand pages can be materially enormous and editorially selective. The edition’s introduction and textual notes, not advertising copy, must define its scope.

Photographs from the Paris presentation show another layer of rights. IHES credits Jean-François Dars for images of Jean-Pierre Bourguignon and Luc Illusie on 4 February 2022. Those credits make the photographs plausible candidates for a chapter about public reception. They do not clear reuse. Permission must be requested from the photographer or appropriate rights administrator, and the depicted people and event must be captioned exactly. 1111Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, “Publication of *Récoltes Et Semailles* by Alexander Grothendieck”.

The 2024 edition and an inference refused

In 2024 Éditions du Sandre issued La Clef des Songes, with a postface by Laurent Lafforgue. The Centre for Grothendieckian Studies announced the publication and reproduced the publisher’s description. Those pages establish the edition’s existence and bibliographic identity, not its complete rights chain. This chapter records authorization as unknown. 1212Centre for Grothendieckian Studies, “*La Clef Des Songes* Published by Éditions Du Sandre”.

This is a deliberately modest conclusion. Commercial books normally travel through permissions and warranties, but “normally” is not a source. The same discipline that prevents an accusation without evidence prevents a reassurance without evidence. Before a formal biography describes the edition as authorized by named heirs or as contrary to a named wish, it should cite an explicit record.

The work’s subject intensifies the ethical question. La Clef des Songes includes autobiography, dreams, spiritual interpretation, and accounts of other people. Publication can be lawful while particular biographical uses remain gratuitous or unfair. Conversely, privacy cannot be invoked vaguely to suppress every historically relevant passage. The biographer’s task is to identify relevance, corroborate claims, minimize needless exposure, and distinguish Grothendieck’s interpretation of a person from independent evidence about that person.

The unstable category of “available online”

Late Grothendieck texts circulated online before formal editions, often through personal or scholarly sites. The 2021 arXiv record for Pursuing Stacks describes an extended and revised electronic edition. Its metadata includes a characterization of an earlier electronic edition as public domain. This chapter records the deposit but does not adopt the metadata as a French legal determination. A repository entry can state what submitters believe about rights; it does not replace jurisdiction-specific analysis. 1313Grothendieck, À la Poursuite des Champs (Pursuing Stacks).

The same caution applies to scans on file-sharing or preservation platforms. Technical downloadability is an observation about a server. It does not establish authorized disclosure, ownership of a scan, permission to translate, or an exception for republication. A scholar may consult a circulating copy to locate a passage and still need an authoritative text and permission for final use.

There is also an ethical distinction between linking and amplifying. A biography that directs specialists to an institutional catalog performs a different act from mirroring tens of thousands of pages. Quoting three necessary lines differs from publishing a chapter. Embedding a full-resolution letter involving a living correspondent differs from describing that a letter exists. Digital scale makes these differences easy to ignore because every act uses the same gesture—copy—but consequences depend on volume, audience, permanence, searchability, and context.

The Montpellier portal embodies both promise and limit. Its launch placed approximately 18,000 pages in open online consultation. Yet the university’s custody, the author’s rights, third-party correspondence, and image reuse remain separate. The portal can be a source for exact cotes while still requiring a request before a facsimile enters a sold book. Any claim of “open access” must specify the permitted action, object, stated terms, and verification date.

Constituencies around the dead

An author is not the only person in a personal archive. Correspondents wrote their own words. Students appear in evaluations. Family members enter autobiographical and spiritual narratives. Doctors, neighbors, and local residents may be identifiable. Some people were public mathematicians; others did not choose public roles. Death weakens some privacy claims in law but does not eliminate ethical responsibility to the living or to vulnerable third parties.

Heirs carry several burdens that outsiders can underestimate. They may hold rights, objects, memories, and unresolved relationships at once. A decision to donate can serve scholarship and also expose family material. A decision to publish may answer one understanding of a parent’s long-term wishes and conflict with another reading of a late refusal. This biography has no access to private deliberations and should not invent motives for them.

Libraries have a different mandate. They preserve, describe, and provide access under law, donor terms, and professional judgment. Publishers create editions for readers, bearing editorial and commercial responsibilities. Mathematicians may feel that ideas necessary to their field ought to circulate, but professional interest is not a property right. The public may reasonably value the archive as cultural heritage, yet public curiosity alone does not justify every disclosure. The politics lies in negotiating these non-identical claims without disguising one as all the others.

The SAA code, though not French law, expresses a useful archival balance: seek the widest appropriate access, respect legal and ethical restrictions, document interventions, and protect privacy, especially for people who had no role in the collection’s creation or release. The Norwegian Research Ethics Library makes a parallel point for biography: public interest must be weighed against relevance, privacy, harm, and trust; mere curiosity is insufficient. 1414Society of American Archivists, “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics”, Judgment, Privacy; Norwegian National Research Ethics Committees, “Biography,” The Research Ethics Library, https://www.forskningsetikk.no/en/resources/the-research-ethics-library/methods/biography/.

Editorial rules of this biography

For this biography, the politics of legacy becomes a set of editorial rules. First, every direct quotation receives an exact locator and a rights status. An unverified quotation can be a research lead but not printed decoration. Second, access is recorded with a date; changing archive interfaces are not described in the eternal present. Third, no manuscript image enters the book without item-level provenance, reproduction permission, and a caption that identifies intervention.

Fourth, published and unpublished texts are separated. A formal edition is cited by edition and page. A manuscript is cited by repository, fonds, series, volume, leaf, and state of transcription. Fifth, claims about living or recently deceased third parties require independent corroboration and a demonstrated narrative purpose. Sixth, editorial disputes are attributed to named critics rather than resolved by tone. Seventh, no current estate, archive, or rights position is declared final unless the responsible institution or rights holder supplies a dated statement.

These rules do not answer the philosophical conflict between a writer’s refusal and readers’ desire. They prevent that conflict from being hidden by sloppy practice. The 2010 declaration stays in view. So do the bequest to the BnF, the deposit in Montpellier, the public editions, the mathematical uses, and the authority French law gives to successors in specified circumstances. None is allowed to swallow the others.

A legacy governed only by prohibition can become inaccessible even to the scrutiny needed to understand the prohibition. A legacy governed only by scholarly appetite can convert a person’s papers and relations into raw material. The responsible position is not a slogan halfway between. It is a procedure applied to each object, with reasons recorded and decisions open to revision.

The next chapter shifts from those who control access to the person who turns access into narrative. A biographer owns neither the life nor the archive. The power is narrower and still formidable: to choose which facts stand together, where uncertainty appears, which silence is respected, and where a page is asked to bear a claim beyond evidence.

Disclosure is not the same as distribution

The legal category of disclosure deserves care because Grothendieck’s works passed through unusual forms. A typescript sent to selected colleagues has been communicated, but the legal consequences for the whole work and later versions require analysis. A manuscript placed in a public archive may be consultable under conditions without having been commercially published. A pirate scan can make a text widely known without converting the act into authorized disclosure. Ordinary language calls all of these “out.”

The distinctions affect quotation. Article L122-5’s short-quotation provision begins from a disclosed work and imposes attribution and purpose conditions. Whether a particular unpublished leaf qualifies cannot be determined by a biographer’s belief that public interest is strong. The source’s disclosure history, the extent quoted, the surrounding analysis, and rights-holder position all matter. 1515Code de la propriété intellectuelle, art. L122-5.

Versions complicate the inquiry. Grothendieck could circulate an early typescript and later add hundreds of pages. Authorization or disclosure of the first does not automatically answer the status of additions. An edition based on one version can be lawful and still need to describe another version for scholarship. “The work” must be defined materially.

The same issue appears in translation. If an English rendering circulates online, the translator’s text may have its own rights even when the underlying French status is contested. Correcting the translation can create another derivative work.

These distinctions should make prose precise rather than legalistic. The chapter can say that a text circulated among mathematicians, that scans were reachable, that a formal edition appeared, or that a repository permits consultation. Each verb identifies an observable event. “Became public” is reserved for a source that explains in what sense.

Correspondence has two sides

Grothendieck’s declaration expressly includes letters he addressed to anyone. An archive of correspondence nevertheless contains at least two authors’ interests. The physical letter may belong to its recipient or repository; copyright in the sender’s expression follows another route; the recipient’s reply has its own author; both may contain facts about third parties. A folder title cannot collapse those layers. 1616Grothendieck, “Déclaration d’intention de non-publication,” 1.

Mathematics adds a special reason to seek letters. Definitions, conjectures, proofs, and credit often developed through correspondence before publication. A letter can establish that an idea circulated by a date. It can also be informal, elliptical, and dependent on shared conversation. Quoting one line to establish priority without the question it answered can reverse its meaning.

Publication of a correspondence therefore requires work beyond collecting both halves. Editors establish provenance and completeness, transcribe, date, annotate names and references, identify missing enclosures, and explain omissions. Rights and privacy must be checked for both writers and named third parties. If one side survives more fully, the asymmetry belongs in the edition.

A biography usually needs less. It can paraphrase the existence and mathematical subject of a letter, cite the exact archive, and quote only when the language itself carries necessary evidence. This reduces rights exposure and prevents personality from overwhelming substance. It also keeps room for a future scholarly correspondence edition whose apparatus can do the object justice.

Living correspondents deserve direct consideration. Their status as mathematicians does not make every family or health detail public. Allegations in a private letter require corroboration. A restriction imposed to protect a third party can be ethically sound even when it delays an attractive story. If the restriction changes, the new access date should be recorded rather than the old barrier denounced retrospectively.

An edition is an argument

Every edition makes decisions even when it does not state them: which witness controls; whether spelling and punctuation are normalized; how cancellations are displayed; where later notes enter; whether repeated passages are retained; whether a table of contents belongs to the author or editor; and what counts as completion. The decisions shape the author readers encounter.

For Récoltes et Semailles, scale magnifies those decisions. A text written across stages, circulated outside conventional publishing, and accompanied by additions cannot be represented adequately by page count and a claim of meticulous transcription. The edition’s apparatus must be read. Schapira’s criticism about excluded additions is important because he argues that some omitted material changes Grothendieck’s position. The claim should be tested against the edition and manuscript witnesses, not settled by the review’s authority or the publisher’s prestige. 1717Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, “Publication of *Récoltes Et Semailles* by Alexander Grothendieck”; Schapira, “A Truncated Manuscript”.

Editorial transparency can accommodate disagreement. An editor may choose a coherent base text and place additions in an appendix. A digital edition may align versions. A reading edition may normalize typography while a critical edition preserves variants. No single format serves every reader. The ethical failure would be to present intervention as absence of intervention.

The politics of length also matters. A publisher bears costs of transcription, design, paper, and distribution. Readers need a navigable work. The author’s repetitions may be philosophically or psychologically significant and editorially burdensome. Cutting can clarify and distort at once. The solution is not an abstract command never to cut; it is a declared scope, recoverable record of omissions, and preservation of the complete witnesses in responsible custody.

Posthumous spiritual writing raises additional apparatus needs. References may be private, idiosyncratic, or dependent on dated readings. Names of living people may require notes or restraint. The editor should not turn correction into doctrinal judgment, nor print every intimate detail merely because it is present. Textual fidelity and ethical presentation are related but not identical duties.

The author’s will and the public interest

The deepest conflict is often posed as a contest between authorial sovereignty and cultural importance. The terms are too absolute. Authors have powerful moral and legal interests, but works also involve collaborators, addressees, institutions, and publics. Cultural importance can justify preservation and critical study without automatically justifying every mode of dissemination.

Grothendieck’s declaration deserves a presumption of serious weight because it is explicit and signed. The public mathematical importance of his work deserves serious weight because fields continue to depend on texts and programs associated with him. His bequest deserves serious weight because it appears to direct late material toward preservation. Successors’ statutory authority deserves serious weight because law provides for posthumous decisions. None of those propositions supplies a universal trump.

Work-specific inquiry is the alternative. It establishes whether the text was disclosed, what the author said about it, what a will directed, who exercises rights, whether the proposed use preserves integrity, whether quotation is necessary, whether third parties are exposed, and whether paraphrase or description can meet the scholarly purpose. The answer can differ between an EGA reprint, a private letter, a dream narrative, and a manuscript diagram.

Public interest should also be articulated, not asserted. “The public has a right to know” is weak when the subject is an intimate anecdote with no bearing on mathematics, activism, or documented choices. It is stronger when a record clarifies institutional funding, authorship of a theorem, or the provenance of a major archive. The balance becomes more accountable when the knowledge sought is named.

Refusal can itself be part of public history. Grothendieck’s efforts to withdraw works express his late relation to institutions, ownership, and audience. Respecting that history does not require the biography to disappear; it requires the act of quotation to remain visible as an ethical decision. The declaration should never be used merely as a dramatic contradiction before a book proceeds to reproduce whatever it pleases.

No final status

Estate and copyright summaries age quickly because they depend on people, agreements, litigation, legislation, and editions. A sentence written in 2026 can become false when an archive updates terms or a rights holder issues a license. This chapter therefore supplies a date of writing and a list of sources, not a permanent status certificate.

At the time of writing, general French statutory provisions were verifiable, BnF reproduction procedures were public, and several editions and archives existed. This account has not examined wills, publishing contracts, deposit agreements, or permission correspondence. It did not identify every successor or determine which person exercises each right. Those questions need documents, not prose that bridges gaps with probability.

The evolving status should remain visible in the finished book where relevant. A note can say “accessed on” or “rights information supplied on.” An image credit can identify a permission date. An archival guide can warn readers to consult current repository conditions. The book can be stable without pretending its external environment is static.

This measured incompletion is the political conclusion. Control over a legacy is distributed, contested, and procedural. A responsible edition does not end politics; it records how a decision was made and leaves evidence for challenge. That transparency is the narrow authority a biographer can legitimately claim.

Integrity after editing

Moral integrity is not preserved merely by reproducing every word. A facsimile can be accurate and misleading if detached from date and genre. A short quotation can reproduce letters perfectly and reverse the argument by removing qualification. A translation can keep propositions and replace tone. Respect for the work therefore has textual and contextual dimensions, whose legal application needs counsel and whose scholarly application belongs to every editor.

Correction presents a hard case. Obvious typographical mistakes can be silently repaired in a reading edition, but a manuscript’s error may be evidence of thought. Mathematical notation that seems mistaken may reflect an earlier convention. A critical apparatus can preserve the original while explaining the correction; a normalized main text should state its policy.

Arrangement can affect integrity even more. Moving late notes into the body may make revision visible or falsely create continuity. Printing notebooks by thematic subject can aid readers and destroy chronology. Omitting repetitive accusations can reduce harm and alter the scale of Grothendieck’s preoccupation. There is no intervention-free solution, only interventions that are disclosed, justified, and reversible through access to witnesses.

Titles and marketing belong to the same ethics. “Secret,” “forbidden,” “last testament,” and “final revelation” can mischaracterize status before the first page is read. A publisher may need concise language; concision does not require certainty unsupported by the archive. Catalog titles, authorial headings, and supplied titles should be visually distinguished.

This account consequently treats integrity as a review path. Textual editors verify witnesses; mathematical reviewers check formulas; historians check chronology and attribution; privacy reviewers examine third parties; rights counsel checks permissions; designers ensure that crops and captions do not change the claim. No reviewer can certify all dimensions alone.

The review record should name each role and its scope. A lawyer’s clearance does not certify historical truth; an archivist’s accurate cote does not clear copyright; a mathematician’s proof check does not justify exposing a living person. “Reviewed” without an object and reviewer is a status word, not evidence.

Temporary inclusion can help assess design, but an uncleared image must remain visibly blocked and must not escape into a public preview. Production convenience cannot convert a research copy into permission. The final build should accept only assets whose cards, files, credits, and edition-specific grants agree.

A permissions archive should outlive individual staff and email accounts. It needs the request, response, rights holder, object, territory, language, media, edition, duration, fee, credit line, and supplied file. Without that record, a future integrator cannot know whether an apparent approval covers the proposed book. The absence of a denial is never permission, and an old grant is never automatically transferable forward.

Unresolved authority must remain unknown; a commercial edition alone cannot prove permission for every later use or quotation.