for athletes, tribal nations, community health boards, athlete representatives, cultural collections, and research review boards
Learn who holds your data and what you can do about it. On your own agreements.
Phazur Labs · Program
The method works on the position, not the sport or the science. Different situations lose control in different places, and each place gives a warning first.
01Where
Likeness, biometrics, and performance telemetry, collected under school and conference terms.
Common stall — the second deal, when the first agreement's usage grant turns out to have no end date.
See how it runs for college athleticsCollective agreements, wearable programs, and league data distribution.
Common stall — renewal, when the clause that covered a practice tracker now covers a betting feed.
See how it runs for professional athletesResearch conducted on citizens, on land, or with tribal resources.
Common stall — a study you never approved, reviewed by a board in another state under a rule you didn't know applied.
See how it runs for tribal nationsSamples and records given for one purpose, sitting in a repository under another.
Common stall — the original consent, when nobody can produce the form the participants actually signed.
See how it runs for community healthHoldings at museums, universities, and agencies, with an obligation to return.
Common stall — the transfer, when a collection moves to a new institution and the obligation doesn't follow it cleanly.
See how it runs for collectionsAn athlete who is also a citizen of a nation, where personal rights and collective rights meet in one deal.
Common stall — the brand story, when what gets licensed is the culture and what gets paid is the individual.
See how it runs for dual standing02Why
Provenance is the record of who held a thing, when, and under what authority. Museums run on it. Research records run on it. So does every data agreement you have already signed — except nobody built you the record.
Most people negotiate data terms on trust. Trust is often warranted, but it can't be checked, handed to a successor, or produced two years later when a counterparty is acquired and the terms travel with the asset.
Provenance is a method that leaves something behind. Ten steps, six documents, two live actions. You work your own agreements from the first session. There are no case studies and no hypotheticals.
Provenance covers the position you take into a negotiation, and then hands off. It does not replace your lawyer, your agent, or your general counsel. It decides what they are arguing for.
03Placement
Provenance
Establish
Who holds it, under what authority, and what would you accept?
Stage 2
Negotiate
Counsel, agents, and representatives working the actual terms.
Stage 3
Execute
Signature, and the obligations that attach.
Stage 4
Monitor
Audits, renewals, and the successor question.
Stage 5
Renew or exit
Revocation, repatriation, or better terms.
Everything before the term is agreed — the inventory, the instrument each holding rests on, the standard the clause should meet, and the price. It also sets the condition for walking away, before anyone is invested in the deal.
Legal drafting, tax structuring, entity formation, or representation in a negotiation. Those are their own disciplines with their own licenses, and this program's job is to make sure they're pointed at the right term.
The two live actions are a real request and a real ask, run during the program rather than after it — while a wrong answer is still cheap.
Ten steps, in order. Each is answered in writing, and the writing is what you keep. The first five map what exists. All ten build a position.
04Method
The claim is written and frozen first, so what you find can't quietly widen or narrow the question you were asking.
"My data" is not a scope. "Biometric and performance data collected by the athletic department and its vendors between 2023 and now" is a scope, because you can tell when the list is complete.
Every party in the chain: the counterparty you signed with, the vendor they use, the platform behind the vendor, the buyer of the aggregate. Most participants find holders they never knew existed, because the transfer happened under a clause they didn't read.
Public records requests to state schools and agencies. Access requests to companies. Holdings inquiries to institutions. Everything filed, tracked, and escalated on a schedule rather than sent once and forgotten.
An unanswered request is not a dead end. It is a dated record that you asked, which matters later.
Three kinds of claim, and they are not equally strong. Name, image, and likeness is property in most states — assignable, licensable, enforceable. A nation's authority over research on its citizens is jurisdictional. Biometric data is usually neither, which is why it lives or dies on the clause.
Every row on the map gets one of the three, and everything after depends on which.
Someone signed off. A consent form, a review board, a conference rule, a collective agreement. Find the document and read who had standing to give it.
This is where communities most often discover a study approved by a board with no relationship to them at all.
Successor clauses, sublicense rights, aggregation, de-identification, and the quiet expansion of "research purposes." Each has a warning that shows before the loss, and a place where that warning shows.
Three most likely get named for your situation, with the warning and where to look for it.
The ceiling exists and it is documented. The NBA's collective agreement bars commercial use and public release of player data, and fines a team $250,000 for raising biometric data in a contract negotiation. MLB permits in-game wearables only voluntarily, limits access to a handful of staff, and lets a player revoke without penalty.
Your clause gets read against that, line by line, and the gap is the ask.
Labels and protocols that travel with the data rather than sitting in a filing cabinet. Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels attach to datasets, publications, collection items, and genetic samples. Cultural protocols set access at fine grain inside the system that holds the material.
A term nobody can see at the point of use is a term that gets forgotten.
Five things, every time. What they get, for how long, for what purpose, who else they can pass it to, and what happens if they're bought.
The right to refuse is the only thing that prices anything, so what you would accept and what you would walk from both get written before the conversation.
Audit rights, revocation conditions, expiry, and who checks. Set now, this is a schedule. Set later, it is a scramble.
Six tools, all taught in the room on your own material. Most are free.
05Tools
A workspace holding your full document set, so every clause test runs against all of it at once instead of one file at a time.
Filing and tracking public records requests across a database of nearly 22,000 agencies, with an archive of more than 120,000 prior requests you can read and copy from. Public universities and state agencies are reachable this way.
Annotation and OCR for the paper: scanned consent forms, faxed contracts, archived correspondence.
Statutory rights vary by state and by what kind of party holds the data. Which one you use decides what comes back.
Where communities customize Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels and institutions generate Notices, embedding provenance and permission into the data infrastructure itself rather than alongside it.
Free and open source, built around cultural protocols that set access by community values, with export that preserves protocols and metadata intact. More than 600 Indigenous groups have used it.
One decision we teach rather than make. Putting sensitive community material into a commercial AI service is itself a sovereignty decision. Local Contexts and Mukurtu exist because the default infrastructure was not built for it. We show you where the line sits. You draw it.
The first nine steps tell you what you should be able to do. Only doing it tells you what you can. Every participant runs two live actions during the program.
06Actions
One real request, filed to a real holder, with a real deadline. A records request to a public university. An access request to a wearable company. A holdings inquiry to an institution.
Written down before it goes: what a full response means, what a partial response means, and what silence means. Three outcomes, defined tightly enough that none can be reinterpreted when the envelope arrives.
One term, taken to one real counterparty. Not a renegotiation of the whole agreement. One clause, with the standard behind it and a stated alternative.
The point is not to win it. The point is to find out how the room responds when you arrive with a document instead of a feeling — because that answer shapes every negotiation after.
Run separately and on purpose. A holder can answer a request fully and still refuse every term. A counterparty can agree to a term while a different holder ignores you entirely. Testing one and assuming the other is how a cycle disappears.
Six documents. Filled in for the holdings you work, blank for everything after. Each one is written to be handed to someone.
07Artifacts
One row per holder: what they hold, when they got it, the instrument, the term, and the expiry. Including the ones you found downstream and never agreed to.
Property, jurisdiction, or contract, marked per row, with the statute or authority named beside it. The weak rows stay visible rather than being quietly dropped, because knowing where you have nothing is half the position.
Requests filed, responses received, escalations sent, and silence recorded. Dated throughout.
This is the document that turns "they never told us" into a record. It is also the one that most often produces the holder nobody knew about.
Line by line, your terms beside the ceiling, with the gap named. Not a wish list. A comparison to language that exists in a signed agreement somewhere.
Scope, duration, permitted use, sublicense limits, successor obligations. Plus the two lines that matter most: what you would accept, and what you would walk from.
Renewal dates, audit windows, revocation conditions, and the warnings from step six — each with a name and a frequency beside it.
Not a filing. A schedule. It gets read on a calendar, which is why you find out early instead of at renewal.
Four sessions. You work your own agreements in all of them.
08Teaching
Everything you can find, mapped. Holders named, instruments marked, gaps listed. Most participants have never seen the whole picture on one page, and this is the picture everything after gets compared to.
Every request that should exist gets drafted and filed. Public records, access requests, holdings inquiries. You leave with them sent and a tracking schedule.
Your clauses read against the ceiling. The gap named. The term sheet built, and the ask prepared and signed off before anyone raises it.
Between sessions — the request is answered and the ask is run
A second relationship, worked by you alone. The faculty examines it afterward, hard, with nothing on the table. The request response and the ask result come back during this session.
Everything you can find about who holds your data, on one page, in one sitting. If that page doesn't show you something your current process missed, you'll know in week one.
Three ways in. Most start with the first.
09Formats
Most common
Four sessions with three or four other participants who are not negotiating against each other.
Single organization
The same four sessions, run for one nation, team, or organization, scheduled against your own review or negotiation cycle.
After the program
Outside eyes on the two steps you can't do on your own material — checking your own authority chain, and finding the weakness in your own position.
Six things move, and each one is measurable against where you started.
10Benefits
One page instead of a guess. The inventory step usually surfaces holders that were never disclosed, which is the first time most participants see the full chain.
A clause read against a standard before signature, not after a dispute.
Records, samples, and datasets returned — because a dated request with a named authority behind it is harder to ignore than a phone call.
Scope, duration, and use written as terms rather than assumed. What was free becomes negotiable.
Successor obligations named in advance, so an acquisition doesn't quietly reset every term you agreed to.
Two years on, when someone asks what was agreed and when, the file answers instead of your memory.
11Capability
Any counterparty, any field, mapped before you sign rather than after.
Know what the best available language looks like, and name the gap without needing anyone to tell you it exists.
Including knowing which statute applies to which kind of holder, and what to do with silence.
A research code, a data use standard, a consent protocol — appropriate to your own standing.
Terms attached to the material itself, in systems built for it.
Dates, triggers, and audits on a schedule, with a name beside each.
12Audience
Likeness, biometrics, and performance data collected under terms nobody walked you through.
Where the collective agreement covers some of it and the vendor contract covers the rest.
The people actually in the room when the term is agreed.
Establishing or strengthening authority over research conducted on citizens, land, or resources.
Holding samples and records under consent that may no longer describe what's happening.
Carrying an obligation to return, and needing somewhere for returned material to live.
Two to four people from the same side, including one with authority to agree or refuse a term. The program runs on live agreements and can't be attended in pieces.
13Limits
We are not your counsel. The instruments discussed require your own lawyer to execute, and the program is built to make that engagement shorter and sharper, not to replace it.
There is no general property right in personal data in US law, and no claim for value already extracted. Repatriation of records and samples is real. A bill for the last five years is not.
We take no custody and no interest. What you do with the position is yours.
Checking your own authority chain and finding the weakness in your own position both ask you to be neutral about your own outcome. Practice doesn't fix that.
Sovereignty includes the right to refuse, the right to license, and the right to do nothing. The method establishes who decides. It does not decide.
14FAQ
Sessions three and four have to be far enough apart for a real request to be answered, which depends on the holder and the statute — usually two to six weeks. Everything else is scheduled against your calendar.
Nations or organizations working to a council, board, or negotiation cycle should say so in the application, and the sessions get placed around it.
The application asks nothing confidential. Inside the program you work your own material and control what is discussed in front of the group. Anyone with sensitive holdings generally takes the private program.
Cohort and private programs are priced differently, and nations or institutions working under federal funding or grant constraints have terms that need naming early. Any filing fees on records requests are separate and usually small.
Repatriation of records and samples has precedent. Retroactive payment for past use mostly does not, because the underlying property claim doesn't exist in US law. The money is in controlling what comes next, and the program is built on that footing rather than a claim your counsel would have to kill.
Every step has a manual path and we teach it. The tools compress the reading and the tracking. They are not the method, and putting sensitive material into any commercial service is a decision we leave to you.
What you leave with is a filled file on real relationships, a request that was answered, and a term that was raised. Those are checkable. A certificate isn't.
15Apply
Applications are reviewed as they arrive. Groups are small — the peer sessions only work among participants who are not negotiating against each other, which limits how many we admit at once.
No confidential material is requested. Every applicant receives a reply with a reason.