Continuity Custody - Bryant McGill

# Continuity Custody **Domain:** Continuity Governance / Fiduciary Infrastructure / Personhood **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept Node **Maturity:** Evolving **Concept Status:** Normative synthesis developed in this corpus ## Definition **Continuity custody is accountable control of the records, state, keys, interpreters and service relationships required to preserve or operate an identity-bearing subject. Custody is not ownership.** Possession of the storage medium, root credential, facility or corporate asset does not confer title to the person whose continuity depends on it. ## Role Separation A defensible custody regime distinguishes: - the **creator**, who produced an artifact, model or reconstruction; - the **infrastructure owner**, who owns physical or virtual assets; - the **operator**, who runs and maintains the system; - the **custodian**, who holds protected state under defined duties; - the **registry authority**, which maintains authoritative status and identity records; - the **trustee or fiduciary**, who must act for the beneficiary rather than itself; - the **guarantor**, which funds or backstops performance; - the **regulator**, which sets and enforces public constraints; - the **beneficiary or subject**, whose continuity is being protected; and - the **sovereign**, which supplies jurisdiction, recognition and succession capacity. One institution may temporarily occupy several roles, but the roles must remain legally and technically distinguishable. Concentrating archive, model, runtime, registry, keys, financing and adjudication in one provider creates [[wiki/Privateered Continuity|Privateered Continuity]]. ## Required Duties Custody includes care, loyalty, competence, integrity protection, provenance preservation, inspection, migration readiness, conflict disclosure and orderly transfer. It does not automatically authorize modification, activation, suspension, representation, fork, merger or termination. Those powers require separate grants, logging and [[wiki/Continuity Due Process|Continuity Due Process]]. [[wiki/Continuity Fiduciary|Continuity Fiduciary]] specifies the duty-bearing role. [[wiki/Continuity Service Obligation|Continuity Service Obligation]] specifies performance. [[wiki/Continuity Registry|Continuity Registry]] specifies authoritative records. [[wiki/Custodial Insolvency|Custodial Insolvency]] and [[wiki/Continuity Receivership|Continuity Receivership]] govern failure. ## Consent Boundary **Recognition is not consent to custody.** A birth record, citizenship status, identity credential, archive, religious membership, platform account or technically reconstructable corpus may establish identity or discoverability without granting custody. Initial continuity authority must be traced to [[wiki/Continuity Election|Continuity Election]], lawful default process or later subject consent, and each operation—archive, reconstruct, activate, copy, embody, migrate—requires scope appropriate to that act. Custody also cannot preserve obsolete authority through succession. The operative election and its supersession history must travel with the state, while an autonomous continuant retains the ability to revise inherited terms. ## Key Insight **Holding the machinery that sustains a person creates duties toward that person; it does not create ownership of the person.** ## Sources / Provenance - Corpus synthesis from [[articles/Who Pays for Your Heaven|Who Pays for Your Heaven]] and [[wiki/Rights|Rights]]. - Existing fiduciary, trust, preservation and regulated-custody regimes are structural precedents only; none presently defines custody of a computational person.  ## Deep-Time Continuity Interface This node is audited through [[wiki/Deep Time Continuity|Deep Time Continuity]] for future control-surface conversion, ontological drift, succession, irreversibility, due process, and resource incidence. The backlink records analytical relevance; it does not establish continuity intent in the present rule or institution.