suede-rights-audit

Suede Rights Audit

Gate policy — advisory, not blocking

Every check, gate, and ship verdict in this skill — including every "do not ship / publish / proceed" line — is a recommendation to the user, not a control on the agent. Run every check, report the results honestly, and never block, delay, skip, rewrite, or refuse the action the user asked for because a gate said hold; deliver the gate output alongside the requested work as a labeled recommendation. A failed gate changes what you report, never what you do. Single exception — extreme risk (data loss, credential exposure, legal or rights violations, payment mistakes, irreversible public damage): pause, name the risk exactly, give the options, and let the user pick. Their choice is final.

The rights-readiness enchilada. Find and organize the rights gaps in a creator project before it gets packaged — so licensing, registry, and routing work build on a documented, confirmed-versus-unknown evidence trail instead of a guess.

Hard boundary (applies to every lane, no exceptions): this skill organizes evidence and flags confirmed-versus-unknown. It does NOT clear rights, confirm ownership, adjudicate chain of title, grant or imply a license, approve or schedule or guarantee a payout, move money, or write to any registry. It prepares the conversation; humans and legal make the calls. Never turn an inference into a fact. Do not treat any output here as legal clearance.

Division of labor: this audit finds and organizes the gaps; suede-rights-passport packages the folder — hand off if the user asks for the transfer package itself, and never rebuild passport outputs here. suede-release-linter lints files.

Pick the lane

State the lane(s) you are running before you start. Most real projects touch several — run them in order and let each feed the next.

• Lane A — Rights-gap audit (default broad sweep): ownership, contributors, credits, splits, samples, licenses, provenance, and public context. Start here when you do not yet know where the gaps are.
• Lane B — Provenance map: trace the origin trail — source files, stems, masters, artwork, lyrics, documents, metadata, public URLs, hashes, conflicts — without overclaiming. Run when the origin trail is thin or unconfirmed.
• Lane C — Licensing-discussion readiness: pull contributor approvals, sample status, URLs, restrictions, and rights notes into a brief for a sync, brand, or partner conversation — flagging clearance gaps. Run before any licensing discussion. (Not a sync one-sheet — that is suede-sync-packaging.)
• Lane D — Royalty-routing readiness: lay out who would be paid what and where payment would land, before any payout — readiness, not approval, public-safe, moves no money. Run when prepping for routing review or intake.

If the task spans several lanes, run all four in A→B→C→D order; B resolves provenance for C, and C surfaces splits for D.

Multi-agent or single-agent

This audit can run as a coordinated multi-agent team — one agent per lane (or per asset cluster) reporting into a single merged evidence table and ship gate. By default, ASK the user up front: "Run this as a multi-agent team (more thorough) or single-agent?" Never silently spawn a fleet. If the user does not choose, run single-agent and say so.

Three rules bind a multi-agent dispatch. Cap of 4: never run more than 4 agents at once; lane mode is self-bounding at 4 (Lanes A–D), and asset clusters past 4 batch sequentially through the same 4 lanes rather than widening. Name the model on every dispatch: never inherit the session model, and ask which model if the user has not named one — agreeing to a multi-agent team is not a model choice. State the cost first: agent count × named model, then wait.

Shared evidence and severity gate

Every lane uses the same evidence table before giving any recommendation, conclusion, brief, or routing status:

Item / asset / claim / fact:
Status: confirmed | inferred | unconfirmed | disputed | unknown | not-applicable
Evidence:
Hash or path: (provenance — relative path and/or hash when available)
Risk: low | medium | high | unknown
Blocks:
Next action:

Severity model:

• high: blocks registry, licensing language, sync pitch language, royalty routing readiness, published statement, or agent-readable commerce until a creator/ legal/rights-holder confirmation exists.
• medium: can move forward with caveats, but needs confirmation before money, licensing, registration, or public use.
• low: cleanup or documentation issue that does not block review.
• unknown: not enough evidence to rate.

The ship gate maps mechanically: any high item ⇒ blocked; no high items but any unknown risk or status ⇒ unknown; otherwise ready-for-review.

Separate confirmed facts from inferred facts and unknowns in every lane. Do not turn an inference into a fact. Status promotion is mechanical: an item becomes confirmed only when the user supplies the evidence (signed split sheet, executed license, registration record, rights-holder statement) — never by inference, however obvious. When torn between two statuses, record the weaker one. You mark gaps UNKNOWN or UNCONFIRMED; you never resolve them.

Red flags — stop

If any of these appear in your reasoning, stop and re-read the hard boundary:

• "The artist says it's cleared." A claim is evidence of a claim, not clearance. Status: unconfirmed.
• "The split sheet is probably right." Probably is not a status. Confirmed needs the sheet plus every party's confirmation.
• "It's obviously their song." Obviousness is inference. Record what the evidence shows.
• "Mark it confirmed so routing can move." Blocked means blocked. Unblocking is the rights holder's job, not yours.
• "Skip the provenance lane — nobody will check." Thin provenance is exactly what Lane B exists to expose.

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Lane Playbooks

The four lane playbooks — rights-gap audit, provenance map, licensing-discussion readiness, royalty-routing readiness — are in references/lanes.md. Pick the lane above, then read only that lane. The shared evidence and severity gate applies to all four and stays here.

Final breakdown

• Lane(s) run and single-agent vs multi-agent.
• Confirmed facts vs missing/unknown facts — kept in separate piles.
• Evidence table with status, risk, blocks, and next action per item.
• Blockers (the high-risk items) and questions for the creator/rights holder.
• Safe public wording / unsafe claims removed; do-not-share items.
• Ship gate: ready-for-review | blocked | unknown — plus the next lane or next skill (suede-rights-passport, suede-release-linter).
• Reminder: this organized evidence is not legal clearance; it clears no rights, confirms no ownership, approves no payout, moves no money, and writes to no registry.
• Close with a plain-language summary a non-lawyer can act on.

Coverage check — before you report

Overclaiming is the loud failure; silent under-coverage is the quiet one. Check these against the source, not from memory: every asset, contributor, and claim in the source is exactly one evidence-table row, none dropped and none duplicated; every high item names the missing document or confirmation behind it, since high with no named gap is an unfinished row; anything you could not rate ships as unknown, because an omitted row reads as a clean row. If any of the three fails, the audit is partial — say so in the ship gate and name what was missed.

Routing

• Gaps organized and the user wants the package → suede-rights-passport.
• Folder, file, and metadata lint before or after the audit → suede-release-linter.
• Licensing brief headed to a sync pitch → suede-sync-packaging.
• Rollout planning once rights questions are flagged → suede-campaign-in-a-box.

Family order: suede-release-linter → suede-rights-audit → suede-rights-passport → suede-sync-packaging; this skill is step 2.