Continuity Liability - Bryant McGill

# Continuity Liability **Domain:** Liability / Continuity Infrastructure / Governance **Doc Type:** Canonical Governance Concept **Maturity:** Proposed ## Definition **Continuity liability allocates responsibility for harm caused by loss, corruption, unauthorized activation, modification, suspension, migration, restoration, fork, disclosure or termination of continuity-bearing state.** ## Allocation Liability should follow the actor and layer able to prevent or remedy the harm. Infrastructure owners, operators, custodians, registry authorities, fiduciaries, guarantors, standards bodies and sovereigns have different duties. Corporate fragmentation should not make aggregate control legally invisible. The framework must distinguish injury to a represented person, injury to a running subject, harm to descendants or forks, loss suffered by relations and public systemic harm. It should also distinguish ordinary negligence, fiduciary breach, unauthorized control and unavoidable scarcity. ## Constitutional Function Liability is not a substitute for preservation. A damages claim after irreversible deletion may be meaningless to the claimant. The first remedies should therefore favor continuity, evidence preservation, restoration, transfer and injunction where feasible. Financial compensation remains important for survivors and derivative harms. The liability must be forecast as well as litigated. [[wiki/Continuity Election|Continuity Elections]] produce [[wiki/Continuity Service Class|service classes]] and measurable [[wiki/Continuity Service Level|service levels]]; their aggregate present and contingent burdens enter a privacy-preserving [[wiki/Continuity Obligation Inventory|Continuity Obligation Inventory]] so [[wiki/Continuity Finance|Continuity Finance]] can fund performance before breach. ## Key Insight **A duty without a remedy invites providers to price extinction as an ordinary breach.** ## See Also [[wiki/Continuity Service Obligation|Continuity Service Obligation]], [[wiki/Continuity Custody|Continuity Custody]], [[wiki/Continuity Finance|Continuity Finance]], [[wiki/Infrastructure Constitutionalism|Infrastructure Constitutionalism]]  ## 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.