Maintainer decision (2026-07-29): full specialist legal review of the TRSL/CUA is postponed until the framework moves out of beta, given limited legal/commercial exposure during build/alpha. WP-0004-T10 and WP-0005-T10 synthesize their jurisdiction research into adopted alpha/beta working defaults (governing law -> arbitration at a neutral seat, liability cap, data protection minimal-collection practice, and the Enforcement Network's fee mechanics) rather than full resolution, and are accepted on that basis. Propagates the decision to the License/CUA V1C1 Appendix A tables and status banners, SCOPE.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, the WP-0008-T05 go-live gate, and README.md.
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Enforcement Network Concept
Working name: Target Revenue Enforcement Network (TREN) Document status: Concept draft — new, 2026-07-29 Purpose: Define the conceptual foundation for a decentralized, contingency-incentivized mechanism by which License §3 (Commercial Use) violations are pursued and recovered, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, without requiring the Licensor to litigate everywhere directly.
Any commercial user of a Milestone Release without a valid Commercial Entitlement is, in effect, taking value the framework is designed to capture as Development Credit. A single, centrally-operated Licensor cannot practically pursue that value across every jurisdiction where a violation might occur. The Enforcement Network proposes that independent, locally-licensed legal practitioners ("Enforcement Partners") may pursue such violations in their home jurisdiction, funded by a share of what they recover, so that enforcement scales the same way the framework's other monetization already does: through aligned incentive rather than central capacity.
1. Motivation
specs/TargetRevenueSourceLicense-V1C1.md §3 restricts Commercial Use without a Commercial Entitlement. Like any license restriction, this is only as strong as its enforcement. A Licensor with one home jurisdiction's legal resources cannot practically:
- detect unauthorized Commercial Use occurring in dozens of other jurisdictions;
- retain qualified local counsel in each one before a violation is even confirmed;
- fund upfront litigation costs against every plausible violation, most of which may not be worth pursuing to a distant, resource-constrained Licensor but might be entirely worth pursuing to a local practitioner who already operates in that market and bears no other case's costs.
This is structurally the same problem the framework's core monetization model already solves for revenue: centralizing everything doesn't scale, but an explicit, transparent incentive structure can recruit distributed effort. The core Target Revenue Framework aligns commercial users' payments with Development Credit; the Enforcement Network proposes to align local legal practitioners' pursuit of unpaid Commercial Use with a share of what they recover.
2. Scope
This concept defines:
- the minimal terminology of the Enforcement Network;
- the relationship between an Enforcement Partner, the Licensor, and the Trust Service;
- the Enforcement Action lifecycle (report → vetting → engagement → pursuit → recovery → allocation);
- the Recovery split (Contingency Share / Platform Share) and its integration with the existing Development Credit / Monetization Extension model;
- the central, framework-breaking legal risk this concept must not paper over: contingency fees for lawyers are not universally available — some jurisdictions ban or tightly restrict them, and the mechanism must degrade gracefully where they do;
- quality-control and anti-abuse principles needed before any Enforcement Action is authorized;
- the new legal instruments this concept requires beyond the License and Commercial Use Agreement.
This concept does not yet define:
- final legal text for an Enforcement Partner Agreement;
- a finalized, universal Contingency Share percentage — 50% is a ceiling case applied only where lawful, per the jurisdiction-conditional rule at §13, not a settled global figure;
- jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction legal feasibility findings (that is
workplans/TREV-WP-0005-enforcement-network-research.md's job); - the Trust Service's Enforcement Registry implementation.
3. Design goals
3.1 Locally lawful by construction
The mechanism must not assume every jurisdiction permits the same fee structure. It must be designed from the start to route around jurisdictions where a direct lawyer contingency fee is unavailable, rather than being drafted for one jurisdiction and applied everywhere by assumption.
3.2 No new discretionary authority for the Trust Service
Consistent with the framework's existing principle (specs/TargetRevenueFrameworkCore.md §1.10: the Trust Service observes, records, calculates, and attests — never decides), the Trust Service must not become the body that decides whether an Enforcement Action is authorized, meritorious, or successful. Those are the Licensor's and the relevant legal system's decisions; the Trust Service records the resulting facts (an Enforcement Action exists, its status, its Recovery, its allocation), the same way it already records Development Credit and Remission Credit without deciding whether a Phase's commercial hypothesis was sound.
3.3 Explicit allocation, not implied recovery
Recovered amounts must be explicitly allocated between Contingency Share and Platform Share, and the Platform Share must be explicitly allocated toward Development Credit (or not) under a canonical Monetization Extension — following Rule 2 (explicit allocation) exactly as every other payment in the framework must.
3.4 Quality control before incentive
A 50%-of-recovery incentive is a strong one, and strong incentives attract both genuinely valuable enforcement and low-quality or frivolous claims. This concept must not treat "an Enforcement Partner is willing to take the case" as sufficient authorization on its own.
4. Non-goals
The Enforcement Network is not intended to:
- replace the Licensor's own discretion over whether to pursue a given violation;
- guarantee that any jurisdiction's contingency-fee rules permit the mechanism as literally described;
- create a bounty system that rewards reporting a violation, as distinct from successfully litigating or settling one (see §7 — this concept currently contemplates compensating the Enforcement Partner's legal work, not a separate whistleblower/reporting bounty; whether those should be different roles with different incentives is an open question, §11);
- authorize an Enforcement Partner to act before a formal engagement instrument exists (§9);
- apply to Noncommercial Use — the Enforcement Network exists solely to pursue unauthorized Commercial Use under License §3.
5. Minimal core terminology
5.1 Alleged Violation
A reported instance of apparent Commercial Use of a Milestone Release without a valid Commercial Entitlement for the applicable Phase.
5.2 Enforcement Partner
An independently practicing lawyer or law firm, licensed in a given jurisdiction, engaged by the Licensor under an Enforcement Partner Agreement to pursue one or more Alleged Violations in that jurisdiction.
5.3 Enforcement Action
A specific legal action (litigation, arbitration, demand/settlement negotiation, or equivalent local procedure) pursued by an Enforcement Partner against a specific party with respect to a specific Alleged Violation.
5.4 Recovery
The total amount actually collected as a result of an Enforcement Action (judgment, settlement, or equivalent), before any split.
5.5 Contingency Share
The outcome-contingent portion of Recovery paid to the Enforcement Partner (or, where local law requires a different structure, to the Litigation Funder — see §8) for pursuing the Enforcement Action, where an outcome-contingent fee is lawful in that jurisdiction at all. Determined per jurisdiction by the Global Contingency Share Determination Rule at §13: 50% where lawful, otherwise the jurisdiction's own lower cap. Where no outcome-contingent fee is lawful at all, there is no Contingency Share — see §5.9 (Standard Financing Amount) instead.
5.6 Platform Share
The remaining portion of Recovery after the Contingency Share (or the full Recovery, where no Contingency Share applied under §13.1 tier 3), payable to the Licensor and subject to explicit allocation under §6.
5.7 Enforcement Registry
The Trust Service component that records Alleged Violations' status, Enforcement Partner engagement, Enforcement Action status, and Recovery/allocation facts, per §3.2's non-discretionary principle. Also publishes, per §13, each jurisdiction's current Jurisdiction Percentage Cap and Standard Financing Amount as background information for prospective Enforcement Partners and Licensors.
5.8 Enforcement Partner Agreement (EPA)
The instrument, distinct from the License, Commercial Use Agreement, and CLA, under which the Licensor engages an Enforcement Partner for a specific jurisdiction and/or Alleged Violation. See §9.
5.9 Standard Financing Amount
A fixed, non-contingent sum the Trust Service makes available toward the cost of pursuing an Enforcement Action, used specifically in jurisdictions where no outcome-contingent fee for this kind of engagement is lawful (§13.1 tier 3). Paid or made available regardless of the Enforcement Action's outcome — it is not a share of Recovery and not conditioned on winning. See §13.3.
6. Recovery allocation and Development Credit
Recovery represents value the framework's Commercial Use restriction should already have captured. The Platform Share should therefore, by default, flow to Development Credit for the applicable Phase — this is arguably the single clearest case of "target-relevant allocation" the framework has, clearer even than a voluntarily-purchased Commercial Entitlement, since it corresponds to Commercial Use that already occurred without payment.
Proposed canonical extension: trsl:extension:enforcement-recovery, with:
extension:
id: trsl:extension:enforcement-recovery
version: "0.1 (proposed)"
value:
description: Recovery collected from an Enforcement Action against unauthorized Commercial Use.
pricing:
method: court/settlement-determined, not priced by the Licensor
allocation:
rule: Platform Share (Recovery minus Contingency Share) becomes Development Credit for the applicable Phase in full, unless a specific portion is separately and explicitly allocated to reimbursing the Licensor's own direct costs of the Enforcement Action.
default_rate: 1.0 (of the Platform Share, not of gross Recovery)
recognition:
event: payment-settled (Recovery actually collected, not merely awarded)
reversal:
rule: A reversed or overturned Recovery (e.g. on appeal) generates a compensating credit-reversal Target Ledger entry.
evidence:
requirement: Enforcement Action case reference, settlement/judgment document, and Recovery collection evidence.
status: registered (proposed; not yet canonical)
This keeps Recovery fully inside the existing accounting model (Rule 2 explicit allocation, Rule 3 no duplicate credit) rather than inventing a parallel bucket.
7. Enforcement Action lifecycle
Extends the framework's five-verb lifecycle (specs/TargetRevenueFrameworkCore.md §3) with an enforcement-specific sub-lifecycle:
- Report — an Alleged Violation is reported (by anyone: the Licensor, a Trust Service operator, a third party, or an Enforcement Partner itself) to the Enforcement Registry.
- Vet — the Licensor (not the Trust Service, per §3.2) reviews the Alleged Violation for plausibility before authorizing pursuit. See §10 for anti-abuse principles this step must satisfy.
- Engage — the Licensor and a prospective Enforcement Partner in the relevant jurisdiction enter an Enforcement Partner Agreement scoped to the specific Alleged Violation(s).
- Pursue — the Enforcement Partner conducts the Enforcement Action under local law and procedure.
- Recover — a Recovery is collected (or the action concludes without one).
- Allocate — Recovery is split into Contingency Share and Platform Share where a lawful Contingency Share applies (§13.1 tiers 1–2), or treated as Platform Share in full where it does not (§13.1 tier 3, §13.4); the Platform Share is allocated per §6; all facts are recorded in the Enforcement Registry and, where applicable, the Target Ledger.
8. The central legal risk: contingency fees are not universal
This is the concept's most important open question, and it must not be resolved by assumption.
Many legal systems restrict or prohibit a lawyer taking a direct percentage of a client's recovery:
- Germany's Rechtsanwaltsvergütungsgesetz (RVG) §4a permits a conditional/contingency fee (Erfolgshonorar) only in narrow circumstances (broadly: where the client would otherwise be economically deterred from pursuing the claim at all) — a general-purpose 50% contingency arrangement as the Licensor describes it is very unlikely to qualify as drafted.
- Many civil-law jurisdictions historically treat pactum de quota litis (a lawyer's fee agreement tied to a percentage of the outcome) as a breach of professional ethics rules, though the details and degree of liberalization vary by country and have shifted over time.
- India's Bar Council of India Rules prohibit advocates from agreeing to fees contingent on the outcome of litigation.
- The United States, by contrast, permits contingency fees broadly (subject to state-bar reasonableness rules).
- The United Kingdom permits Conditional Fee Agreements and Damages-Based Agreements, but under statutory caps and structural conditions distinct from a plain 50% cut.
Working hypothesis (not yet validated — see workplans/TREV-WP-0005-enforcement-network-research.md): where a jurisdiction restricts direct lawyer contingency fees, the mechanism should separate two roles the Licensor's original proposal collapses into one:
- Litigation Funder — a non-lawyer party (which may or may not be affiliated with the Trust Service operator) that bears the economic risk of the Enforcement Action and is contractually entitled to the Contingency Share, structured as a funding arrangement rather than a legal-fee arrangement;
- Local Counsel — the retained, locally-licensed lawyer or firm, compensated under whatever fee structure that jurisdiction's professional-conduct rules actually permit (hourly, fixed, capped conditional fee, etc.), paid by the Litigation Funder or the Licensor rather than receiving the Contingency Share directly.
Where a jurisdiction does permit a lawyer to be both funder and counsel (the US being the clearest case), the Enforcement Partner role can collapse back into a single party, as originally envisioned. This split-role model is a proposed design response to a real legal constraint, not yet confirmed to be sufficient in any specific jurisdiction — third-party litigation funding is itself separately regulated (registration, disclosure, and champerty/maintenance doctrines in some common-law jurisdictions) and needs its own per-jurisdiction check.
8.1 Findings so far (workplans/TREV-WP-0005-enforcement-network-research.md T01–T09, all 8 jurisdiction/family tasks done)
All eight jurisdiction/family tasks are now complete. The pattern is more varied than a simple "civil law needs split-role, common law doesn't" split:
| Jurisdiction | Single-role viable? | Realistic ceiling | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | Very likely not | N/A — narrow §4a gates, not percentage-based | Split-role realistic path |
| France | Likely yes | Uncapped (fixed-fee-plus-result-fee structure) | Pactum de quota litis (pure %) void |
| United States | Yes | No fixed cap (state-bar reasonableness) | Needs timely copyright registration to be economically attractive |
| United Kingdom | Yes | 50% (DBA statutory max, "all other cases") | Only jurisdiction where 50% is exactly validated |
| Argentina | Yes | 35% ordinarily (Buenos Aires City); 50% only with risk-assumption | 50%-with-risk-assumption resembles the Litigation Funder model natively |
| India | No — flat prohibition, no exception gates | N/A | Cleanest confirmation of split-role necessity; funding explicitly permitted |
| China | Yes | 18% down to 6%, sliding scale by claim size (larger claims get a smaller ceiling) | Also likely needs its own governing-law/venue rider (§8, cross-refs License Appendix A item 6) |
| South Africa | Yes | 25% (or 2× normal fee if lower) | Hard statutory cap, confirmed via the Contingency Fees Act itself |
| OHADA zone | Not confirmed | — | Genuinely unresearched; do not assume the French pattern applies |
| Singapore | Only for arbitration/SICC/mediation | N/A | Ordinary litigation likely needs the fallback structure |
| Japan | Yes, broadly | No fixed cap | Article 12 bans lawyer fee-splitting with non-lawyers — a compliance risk for the split-role model itself, not just the single-role fallback |
| Australia | Only Victoria, only class actions | N/A | Litigation funding market is mature nationally — split-role by default, for a different reason than Germany/India |
Key findings beyond the per-jurisdiction ceiling:
- 50% is not a safe global default anywhere except the UK. Most jurisdictions cap meaningfully lower (18–35%), several ban direct lawyer contingency outright, and the "with risk assumption" pattern that unlocks higher percentages (Argentina) or avoids professional-conduct problems entirely (Germany, India, Australia) recurs often enough that the split-role Litigation Funder structure should probably be the default EPA option, with single-role as the jurisdiction-specific exception — the reverse of how the concept was originally framed in §8.
- The split-role structure is not universally safe either. Japan's Article 12 fee-splitting rule is the first finding in this program suggesting the Funder/Counsel split needs jurisdiction-specific structuring, not just jurisdiction-specific availability checking.
- China likely needs a dedicated EPA governing-law rider, not just a dedicated fee structure — the same foreign-related-contract constraint found in
workplans/TREV-WP-0004-global-jurisdiction-research.mdT06 applies to the EPA itself. Update (T09,history/260729-TRSL-GlobalChoiceOfLaw-Strategy.md): arbitration, not litigation, is likely the more promising path here too — China has enforced the New York Convention since 1986 for arbitral awards, unlike foreign court judgments, which it has no equivalent convention for. Not yet confirmed whether an Enforcement Action under this concept would itself be arbitrable rather than requiring litigation.
Finding 1 above — that a flat 50% is unsafe almost everywhere — is exactly what §13's Global Contingency Share Determination Rule (added 2026-07-29, at the Licensor's request) is designed to handle systematically rather than jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction improvisation.
A concrete Litigation Funder/Local Counsel mechanism design and payment-flow diagram (built from the first three jurisdictions researched) is at history/260729-TREN-MechanismDesign.md — its §4 feasibility table is now superseded by the fuller table above and should be read alongside it, not in place of it, pending T10's formal synthesis and human-accept update.
9. New legal instrument: Enforcement Partner Agreement (EPA)
A fourth instrument type, alongside the License, Commercial Use Agreement, and (for contributors) the CLA. Should address, at minimum:
- scope (which Alleged Violation(s) and jurisdiction the engagement covers);
- authorization (the Licensor's grant of authority to pursue the Enforcement Action on its behalf — likely a power of attorney or equivalent local instrument, not an assignment of the underlying copyright);
- fee structure per §13's rule: an outcome-contingent Contingency Share (tiers 1–2) or a non-contingent fee arrangement supported by the Standard Financing Amount (tier 3), jurisdiction-appropriate per §8's split-role design where applicable;
- conduct standards and reporting obligations back to the Licensor;
- confidentiality and coordination with any Trust Service publication of the Enforcement Action's existence and status;
- termination and withdrawal (including the Licensor's ability to settle or withdraw independently of the Enforcement Partner's preference, and how that interacts with the Contingency Share if the Licensor settles directly).
This instrument is not drafted in this concept document. It is a future deliverable, analogous to how the Commercial Use Agreement was recommended in history/260729-TRSL-ContributorRights-Research.md before being drafted as specs/TargetRevenueCommercialUseAgreement-V1C1.md.
10. Quality control and anti-abuse principles
A strong financial incentive to find and pursue violations creates real risk: aggressive or mistaken claims against parties who are actually within Noncommercial Use or who hold a valid Commercial Entitlement the Enforcement Partner simply didn't check for, reputational harm to the framework (compounding the risk already flagged for License §7.4's breach-naming mechanism), and adversarial dynamics resembling "copyright trolling" if registry admission and case vetting are too permissive.
Proposed principles (not yet finalized):
- Registry admission is not case authorization. An Enforcement Partner may be registered as available in a jurisdiction without any specific Alleged Violation being authorized for pursuit.
- The Licensor vets before engagement, per §7 step 2 — not the Trust Service (§3.2), and not the Enforcement Partner unilaterally.
- A minimum evidentiary bar for an Alleged Violation to proceed to vetting (analogous to the Target Ledger's evidence tiering,
specs/TargetRevenueFrameworkCore.mdconcept, working default Q10's E0/E1/E2 tiers) — e.g., some E1-equivalent showing of actual Commercial Use, not mere suspicion. - Published Enforcement Action outcomes (win/loss/settlement rate per Enforcement Partner) as a Trust Service transparency measure, giving the ecosystem the same kind of conformity signal License §7.4 already establishes for breaches — this could double as a check on Enforcement Partner quality over time.
11. Open design questions
- Should reporting an Alleged Violation carry its own, smaller incentive, separate from the Contingency Share paid for successfully litigating it — i.e., should "finder" and "pursuer" be different, separately-compensated roles? Not resolved here.
- Is 50% the right Contingency Share in jurisdictions that do permit direct lawyer contingency fees, or is that a Licensor-set parameter that should vary by expected case value/complexity? Currently a working default, not a rule.
- How does an Enforcement Action's Recovery interact with License §7.4's breach-disclosure mechanism, given litigation is typically a public record already in most jurisdictions — does the CUA's opt-in naming election even apply to a party who was never a Commercial Entitlement holder in the first place (they had no CUA to route the election through)?
- Should the Licensor bear the risk of an unsuccessful Enforcement Action (Enforcement Partner/Litigation Funder absorbs the loss, standard contingency structure) uniformly, or could some jurisdictions' fee-shifting rules ("loser pays") expose the Licensor to the losing defendant's costs — and if so, who bears that risk?
- Does an Enforcement Partner's local engagement require the Licensor to have standing/presence recognized in that jurisdiction, or can a foreign copyright holder generally engage local counsel without separate registration? Jurisdiction-specific.
- Should there be a cap on aggregate Enforcement Actions pursued against a single class of common, good-faith mistakes (e.g., a small business that exceeded Noncommercial Use inadvertently) before a lighter-touch remedy (a cure notice, as in License §7.2) is required, to avoid the Enforcement Network becoming disproportionate to ordinary License §7 breach-and-cure process for parties who already hold some relationship with the Licensor?
12. Relationship to existing framework documents
- License (
specs/TargetRevenueSourceLicense-V1C1.md): §3's Commercial Use restriction is what the Enforcement Network enforces; §7's breach/termination process governs parties who already hold a Commercial Entitlement, and is legally distinct from pursuing a party with no Commercial Entitlement at all (the latter is closer to infringement than to contract breach — see open question 3). - Commercial Use Agreement (
specs/TargetRevenueCommercialUseAgreement-V1C1.md): not directly implicated, since Enforcement Actions target parties who lack one — but its §9 breach-disclosure mechanism is the closest existing analog for how Enforcement Action outcomes might be published. - Monetization Extension Specification: §6 above proposes a new canonical extension,
enforcement-recovery, following the existing six-field contract exactly. - Trust Service (
specs/TechnicalSpecificationDocument.md§4.1): needs a new component, the Enforcement Registry, following the same observe/record/publish boundary as the existing Breach/Compliance Record component.
13. Global Contingency Share Determination Rule
Added 2026-07-29, revised 2026-07-29 (same day, maintainer correction), at the Licensor's request, in direct response to workplans/TREV-WP-0005-enforcement-network-research.md's finding that a flat 50% Contingency Share is unsafe in most researched jurisdictions. This section defines a single rule that determines how an Enforcement Action is funded for any jurisdiction, so the framework does not need bespoke negotiation each time a new jurisdiction is added.
13.0 The Licensor always decides whether to press the case
Before anything else in this section: nothing here creates a right for the Trust Service, an Enforcement Partner, or a Litigation Funder to initiate an Enforcement Action. The decision to pursue a specific Alleged Violation belongs exclusively to the Licensor (the owner of the licensed code), exactly as already stated in §7 step 2 ("Vet") and §3.2 (the Trust Service never decides). What this section adds is not a new decision-maker — it is a ready, low-friction default the Licensor can draw on once it has decided to proceed: a published Jurisdiction Percentage Cap, a published Standard Financing Amount, and (via §9) a template Enforcement Partner Agreement — so that a Licensor who chooses to press a case is not starting from zero in an unfamiliar jurisdiction. Making this default easy to reach must never be read as making it automatic.
13.1 The rule
For a given jurisdiction, funding an Enforcement Action the Licensor has decided to pursue works as follows:
- If an outcome-contingent fee (Local Counsel or Litigation Funder entitled to a share of Recovery) is lawful at 50% in that jurisdiction for this kind of engagement, the Contingency Share is 50%, paid from Recovery, contingent on the outcome exactly as an ordinary contingency fee.
- Else, if a lower outcome-contingent percentage is lawful (the Jurisdiction Percentage Cap, §13.2, is greater than 0%), the Contingency Share is that jurisdiction's cap — still paid from Recovery, still contingent on the outcome, just smaller than 50%.
- Else (the Jurisdiction Percentage Cap is 0% — no lawful outcome-contingent fee exists for this kind of engagement at all, e.g. Germany generally, India): there is no Contingency Share. Instead, the Trust Service makes available the Standard Financing Amount (§13.3) — a fixed sum, paid or made available regardless of the Enforcement Action's outcome, toward the cost of bringing the case. The Licensor's own fee arrangement with its lawyer (necessarily non-contingent in this branch, since outcome-contingency is what is unlawful here) governs what is actually owed, win or lose; the Standard Financing Amount offsets that cost, it does not replace or guarantee it.
This is a sequential rule, not a "take the higher of two comparable numbers" calculation (an earlier draft of this section compared the Jurisdiction Percentage Cap and the financing amount as if both were contingent shares of Recovery — that was a mistake, corrected here: a contingent percentage and a non-contingent financing sum are not commensurable, and treating them as interchangeable is exactly what would make the financing amount look like a disguised contingent fee, defeating its purpose). Where tier 1 or 2 applies, there is no financing amount question — a lawful contingent fee is being paid. Where tier 3 applies, there is no Contingency Share at all — only non-contingent financing support.
13.2 Jurisdiction Percentage Cap
The maximum lawful outcome-contingent percentage of Recovery for a given jurisdiction. Where no lawful outcome-contingent fee exists at all for this kind of engagement, the Jurisdiction Percentage Cap is 0%, and §13.1 falls through to tier 3.
Adopted 2026-07-29 (workplans/TREV-WP-0005-enforcement-network-research.md T10, history/260729-TREN-Synthesis.md §2), for the eight jurisdictions/families researched so far:
| Jurisdiction | Jurisdiction Percentage Cap |
|---|---|
| Germany | 0% |
| France | N/A — fixed-fee-plus-uncapped-result-fee structure required, not a bare percentage |
| United States | N/A — 50% lawful directly (§13.1 tier 1 applies) |
| United Kingdom | N/A — 50% lawful directly (§13.1 tier 1 applies) |
| Argentina | 35% ordinarily (Buenos Aires City); up to 50% only if counsel assumes case-cost risk |
| India | 0% |
| China | Sliding schedule: 18% (<1M CNY) → 15% (1–5M) → 12% (5–10M) → 9% (10–50M) → 6% (>50M) — a schedule, not one figure; must be published as such |
| South Africa | 25% (or 2× normal fee if lower) |
| OHADA zone | Unresearched — do not assume the French pattern applies |
| Singapore | 0% for ordinary litigation; not stated as a percentage for arbitration/SICC/mediation, where a Conditional Fee Agreement is separately available |
| Japan | No fixed cap, but see §13.5 item 5's Article 12 flag before relying on this |
| Australia | 0% outside Victoria class actions |
The Enforcement Registry (§5.7) publishes the current Jurisdiction Percentage Cap for every jurisdiction with an active or prospective Enforcement Partner, as background information for prospective Enforcement Partners and Litigation Funders — this is a publication obligation, not a discretionary determination, consistent with §3.2's non-discretionary principle. The table above is the Stage 0/1 adopted content for that publication; remaining jurisdictions (Africa's other major economies, further Asia-Pacific) are not yet researched.
13.3 Standard Financing Amount
Purpose. A fixed sum made available by the Trust Service toward the cost of bringing an Enforcement Action, payable without any dependency on that Enforcement Action's outcome. Because it does not depend on winning, losing, or settling, it is not a contingent fee at all — it is closer to a grant or subsidy toward litigation cost, and is used specifically in jurisdictions (§13.1 tier 3) where an outcome-contingent arrangement for this kind of engagement is not lawful, so that the framework's support mechanism does not itself risk being characterized as a disguised contingent fee.
Not a bounty. Nothing in this section pays more, or pays at all, because a case succeeds. If the case does not yield a Recovery, the Standard Financing Amount already advanced is not repaid or clawed back, and the Licensor still owes its lawyer whatever their own (non-contingent) fee agreement provides — the financing reduces the Licensor's up-front cost of trying, it does not change who bears the risk of losing.
Default: the local-currency equivalent of US $1,000.
Annual recalculation: once per year, at a mid-year calculation date, for each jurisdiction: if more than 10 Enforcement Actions have settled in that jurisdiction (successfully or not) in the trailing 18 months, the Standard Financing Amount for the following year is recalculated as 50% of the average unpaid Commercial Use fees across those settled cases. If 10 or fewer qualifying cases exist, the Standard Financing Amount remains the US $1,000 (local-currency-equivalent) default — this sample-size floor exists to avoid setting a jurisdiction's figure from a statistically thin sample.
Governance calendar: the recalculated Standard Financing Amount for a jurisdiction (or confirmation that it remains the $1,000 default) is announced no later than 31 July, and takes effect for Enforcement Actions in that jurisdiction from the following 1 January. A jurisdiction's Standard Financing Amount therefore changes at most once per year, on a known, published schedule — never retroactively, and never mid-cycle.
Cap. The Standard Financing Amount made available in a specific case cannot exceed that case's own unpaid Commercial Use fees (a case-specific fact established through the Enforcement Action's evidence, the same way a Development Credit amount is established) — it funds pursuit of a specific, quantifiable shortfall, not an open-ended subsidy.
Fee risk is genuinely higher where outcome-contingency is banned. This is a direct, intended consequence of tier 3, not an oversight: where the law does not permit shifting the risk of losing onto contingent counsel, that risk sits with the Licensor, same as it would for any ordinary litigant in that jurisdiction. The Standard Financing Amount lowers the barrier to trying; it does not, and structurally cannot, eliminate that risk without becoming the same disguised contingent fee tier 3 exists to avoid.
13.4 Recovery allocation is unaffected by which tier applied
Where tier 3 applied (no Contingency Share, only non-contingent financing), the Recovery collected is not reduced by a contingency carve-out — the full Recovery is Platform Share under §6, since no one was paid a contingent share of it. Whether the Standard Financing Amount already advanced should then be reimbursed to the Trust Service out of that Recovery is an open question (§13.5 item 3), not resolved by this rule.
13.5 Resolutions and remaining open items
Adopted 2026-07-29 (workplans/TREV-WP-0005-enforcement-network-research.md T10, history/260729-TREN-Synthesis.md §3), as alpha/beta working defaults — see history/260729-TRSL-Jurisdiction-Synthesis.md §3 for what "adopted for alpha/beta" means and does not mean:
- Funding source for the Standard Financing Amount: the Licensor funds it directly, out of pocket. A pooled fund contributed to by successful Phases is a reasonable future design, deferred as unnecessary complexity while pilot-stage Enforcement Actions are expected to be rare or nonexistent.
- Currency conversion methodology: the rate prevailing at the announcement date (31 July), published alongside the announcement — promoted from working assumption to adopted rule.
- An advanced Standard Financing Amount is reimbursed from Recovery, ahead of Development Credit allocation, if the case succeeds. This does not reintroduce outcome-contingency for the Enforcement Partner's own fee (still non-contingent either way) — it only affects whether the Trust Service recoups its own outlay.
- The 18-month look-back window means cases settled within the 18 months immediately preceding the mid-year calculation date — promoted from working assumption to adopted rule.
- In a tier 3 jurisdiction, the split-role structure collapses to a single non-contingent Local Counsel engagement, financed in part by the Standard Financing Amount; a separate Litigation Funder is not required by default unless a specific case's economics call for one.
Not resolved, and not to be treated as resolved by the above: Japan's Article 12 fee-splitting prohibition threatens the split-role fallback itself, not just the single-role default (§8.1, history/260729-TREN-Jurisdiction-AsiaPacific.md). This is a distinct category of risk from the items above — it goes to whether an engagement is lawful at all, not how favorable its terms are. Recommendation: do not pursue an Enforcement Action in Japan under either structure until specifically reviewed by Japanese counsel, even during alpha/beta.
14. Concise definition
The Enforcement Network is a proposed mechanism by which independent, locally-licensed Enforcement Partners pursue unauthorized Commercial Use of a Milestone Release in their home jurisdiction — always at the Licensor's own decision to press the case, never automatically. Where lawful, pursuit is funded by an outcome-contingent Contingency Share of Recovery (up to 50%, or the jurisdiction's lower cap); where outcome-contingent fees are not lawful at all, the Trust Service instead makes available a fixed, non-contingent Standard Financing Amount toward the cost of pursuit, leaving the Licensor's ordinary fee risk with its own lawyer intact. Recovery not consumed by a lawful Contingency Share flows to Development Credit for the applicable Phase. Because lawyer contingency fees are not available in every jurisdiction, the mechanism must be capable of separating the economic-risk-bearing role (Litigation Funder) from the locally-compliant legal-representation role (Local Counsel) where local professional-conduct rules require it, rather than assuming a single global fee structure works everywhere.