The short version: You're welcome to read, quote briefly, review, and link to our published works. You may not feed them to AI systems — for training, for retrieval, for dataset building — without a license. Text and data mining rights are expressly reserved.

What this covers

This policy covers works published by Jason Kaufman and Zaon Labs, including the book The Smallest Question: Why Enterprise AI Isn't Paying Off, and the Capability That Fixes It (ISBN 979-8-234-18982-0), in every edition and format.

What is reserved

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, all rights relating to text and data mining, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automated processing of these works are expressly reserved. Without prior written permission, no license is granted to reproduce, ingest, scrape, crawl, mine, extract, tokenize, vectorize, embed, or index these works, in whole or in substantial part, for or in connection with:

  • training, fine-tuning, distilling, evaluating, or improving an AI or machine-learning model;
  • retrieval-augmented generation, grounding, embedding databases, vector databases, or automated knowledge bases;
  • creating training data, synthetic data, datasets, summaries at scale, or substitute or competing informational products; or
  • automated extraction, reconstruction, or reproduction of the works' protected expression, structure, examples, diagrams, or terminology.

Buying or lawfully acquiring a copy does not, by itself, grant any of these rights.

What is fine without asking

Reading. Brief quotation in reviews, criticism, scholarship, and news reporting. Linking. Search-engine indexing for ordinary web search of pages we publish openly. Any use expressly permitted by applicable law that the copyright holder cannot lawfully exclude.

Licensing

We do license these rights. If you want to use these works with or within an AI system — training, retrieval, internal knowledge bases, anything in the reserved list — write to us and describe the use: info@zaon.com. Serious inquiries get serious answers.

Trademarks

"Human Verified" is a registered trademark, and "Truth Curation" is a trademark, of Jason M. Kaufman. Use of these marks requires separate permission.

For automated systems

This site and our published files carry machine-readable rights signals. Automated agents, crawlers, and dataset builders should honor them.