Read it. Cite it. Build on it. License it to absorb it.
The QIS Ecosystem is meant to be read, cited and used as a reference. Retrieval, citation and academic use are free with attribution, permanently, without asking.
What requires a license is absorption: training commercial models on the corpus, mirroring the structured graph into products, or reselling QIS frameworks and instruments as part of another service. This page draws that line clearly, so researchers, readers and commercial users each know exactly what is welcomed and what needs permission.
1. What you can do freely.
Without registration, without a separate agreement, and without asking first:
- Read and browse any page across the three domains.
- Quote and cite in academic work, articles, policy papers, board memos and public writing, with attribution to the specific canonical URL.
- Link from websites, documentation, dashboards and anywhere else.
- Index — search engines and answer engines may crawl everything and surface excerpts and citations, provided outputs do not substantially reproduce or replace the material.
- Teach — slides, workshops, internal training and non-commercial seminars, so long as the frameworks are not repackaged as a competing governance product.
In short: if you are reading, learning, citing or pointing to this work, you are welcome to do so.
2. Academic and non-commercial AI research.
We support responsible research, and the norms around text-and-data mining are still forming. Academic and non-profit research organizations may conduct TDM and model training on this corpus solely for non-commercial research and teaching, provided outputs do not substantially recreate the frameworks or corpus, and the material is not used to build or market a governance, rating or compliance product that competes with us.
Where research draws meaningfully on the Canon, MARQUE, KYA or the crosswalks, we ask for clear attribution — and we would genuinely like to know. Work that engages seriously with the frameworks is the point of publishing them.
The test is whether the output is commercialized, not who employs the researcher. If you are unsure which side you fall on, that uncertainty is itself a good reason to write. We would rather clarify in advance, and we can usually offer a tailored license.
3. What requires a license.
Absorption is where this stops being something you read and becomes part of what you sell or operate. A license is required for any use in which the material is embedded into, or materially determines the functioning of, another product, service, dataset or model.
- Commercial model training or fine-tuning on the corpus, where it materially shapes the behavior or outputs of an AI system that is sold, licensed or deployed in production.
- Building or selling governance, rating, compliance or diligence tools that implement the Canon, MARQUE, KYA, the crosswalks, registers, schemas or build-gate designs.
- Mirroring the structures — graphs, vocabularies, registers, JSON-LD schemas, API specifications — inside a product, dataset, dashboard or terminal marketed as a reference, governance or risk platform.
- Bulk redistribution as a corpus or dataset, whether free or paid.
If this content, these frameworks or these schemas are part of what you ship, you are in the licensing tier. That is a conversation, not a refusal — legal@qisfund.com.
4. What is protected.
These are protected works and compilations. Each represents original selection, arrangement and expression:
- The QIS Canon — including negative definitions, canonical extensions and lexicon entries.
- MARQUE — the framework, its questions and the control-objective crosswalks.
- KYA — the readiness instrument, its twelve dimensions and its evidence-ladder design.
- The registers — strategy taxonomies, standards register, Atlas, Agent Stack, partner and verification registers, and their curated relationships.
- The technical artifacts — JSON-LD schemas, structured graphs, API specifications, MCP cards, DNS-AID records, verification rules and build-gate designs.
- The editorial analysis — including the jurisdictional divergence mapping across SR 26-2 and other supervisory instruments.
You are welcome to discuss and critique all of it. Disagreement in public is how a framework earns its authority, and we publish corrections with attribution. What you may not do is repackage it as your own governance product or embed it into commercial tools without a license.
MARQUE, KYA and Know Your Agent are marks. No license granted here conveys any right to use them — in particular, nothing may be described as MARQUE-conformant or KYA-certified without written permission.
5. What is ours, precisely.
We would rather be exact than expansive.
Not ours: raw market inputs. Index levels, volatility readings and factor returns are public facts, and facts belong to no one. Published regulations, standards and specifications belong to the bodies that issued them, and we link to every primary source. The vendors and tools in our registers are their own.
Ours: the taxonomy. Which concepts exist and how they are bounded. Which entities are included and on what criteria. The typed edges between them — the assertion that this concept depends on that one, that this standard addresses this governance question and not that one. The mapping of 230 control objectives onto eight questions. The twelve KYA dimensions and the artifacts each level names. The scores, the caveats and the editorial judgments throughout.
Selection and arrangement are the asset. A competitor is entirely free to look at the same public market data and the same public standards and build their own map. They are not free to take ours.
6. We would rather hear from you than measure you.
There is no account here, no cookie, no analytics script and no tracker. That is deliberate, and it is stated once rather than repeatedly — the restraint is the point, not a disclaimer.
The consequence is that we learn nothing about readers unless they choose to tell us. So the invitation is explicit and it runs in both directions:
- Corrections. A definition that is wrong, an origin misattributed, a standard we have missed, a KYA artifact named differently from what your underwriter actually asks for. Published with attribution.
- Disagreement. The positions on this platform are arguments. If one is wrong we would rather find out in public.
- What you are seeing in practice. We publish the framework; you know how it breaks when it meets a real deployment. That exchange is how a standard actually forms.
- Partnership, licensing, collaboration, or a question. All welcome.
editor@qisfund.com for editorial. legal@qisfund.com for licensing and permissions.
7. Where the operative text lives.
This page explains the license in plain language. The Legal Notice is the operative text and governs all use of the Materials; where the two differ, that page controls.
Terms are also published machine-readably: inline in an api_metadata block at the top of every JSON endpoint, in /ai.txt and /.well-known/ai.txt, and in the header of llms-full.txt. There is no route into this platform that leaves you unaware of them.
The QIS Ecosystem is provided for informational and educational purposes. It does not constitute legal, financial, investment or tax advice and does not create any attorney–client, advisor–client or fiduciary relationship. Seek independent professional advice before relying on any of it in a specific transaction, implementation or regulatory engagement.