This framework was built in a digital context. The legitimacy gate, the licensing infrastructure, the settlement standard, the sovereignty of the person over what they generate — all of it was developed in response to a digital economy that organized human participation at scale without asking. That's where the problem became visible, but it's not where the problem begins.
The problem begins wherever a person contributes something of value and the terms of that contribution are set by someone else. That's not a digital condition. It's the condition of labor, land, cultural knowledge, and creative work. It's a condition of every form of human-origin participation that has ever been organized by an entity that arrived after the fact and built itself around what the person generates. Digital made it visible and the framework that responds to it can't stop at the edge of the screen.
This paper names what remains.
Jurisdictional gap — The distance between where the framework currently operates and where it needs to operate. Origin Economics and the Digital Personhood framework were developed primarily in response to digital participation. The jurisdictional gap is the body of law, practice, and institutional arrangement that governs non-digital human-origin participation and has not yet been brought into alignment with the sovereignty principle the framework establishes.
Labor law — The body of law governing the relationship between workers and the entities that organize their participation. Labor law recognizes some forms of worker sovereignty — the right to organize, the right to refuse unsafe conditions, the right to a minimum wage — but does not yet recognize the worker as a sovereign origin whose process knowledge, accumulated judgment, and physical contribution require a license before they can be legitimately organized for profit.
Treaty law — The body of international agreements governing the relationship between states and indigenous peoples. Treaty law has repeatedly failed to recognize the sovereignty of indigenous people over the cultural knowledge, land use patterns, and accumulated participation that corporations and states have organized without permission. The framework's sovereignty principle applies directly, and the gap between what treaty law currently provides and what sovereignty requires is among the most urgent unfinished work.
Cultural property — The accumulated creative, spiritual, and practical knowledge of a people, expressed in patterns, practices, stories, ceremonies, seeds, medicines, and ways of living. Cultural property is H at the scale of a community across generations. It has been organized, commodified, and sold without license for as long as extraction economies have existed. The framework establishes that cultural property requires a license before it can be legitimately used, and that the community at its origin is the sovereign party that grants or withholds that license.
The Digital Personhood framework is complete as a digital specification. The Clearing, The Hall, the legitimacy gate, the settlement infrastructure, the licensing architecture — all of it is built for the world where participation flows through screens, servers, and behavioral data that is harvested at scale. That world is real and the framework addresses it fully.
But the ranch hand possesses knowledge that doesn't live in a server. The weaver's pattern knowledge doesn't flow through a platform. The farmer's seed varieties weren't harvested by an algorithm. The blues musician's sound wasn't captured by a behavioral tracking system. All of them are H and all of them were organized without a license. None of them are fully covered by the digital architecture that the framework specifies, because the law that governs their participation is not digital law. It's labor law, intellectual property law, property law, treaty law, and contract law — bodies of legal practice that predate the digital economy by centuries and have not yet been brought into alignment with the sovereignty principle this framework establishes. Bringing them into alignment is the unfinished work.
Labor law needs to be extended to recognize the worker not only as a party with rights to safe conditions and minimum compensation but as a sovereign origin whose accumulated knowledge, judgment, and physical contribution are H — sovereign property that requires a license before it can be legitimately organized for profit. The factory worker whose movement patterns were studied and systematized, the nurse whose clinical judgment was harvested into an algorithm, the ranch hand whose thirty years of accumulated knowledge flows into an enterprise he will never own — all of them are operating in a legal environment that recognizes their labor but not their sovereignty. Extending the framework into labor law means building the legal argument that the sovereign origin principle applies to every form of human-origin participation, not only to digital participation, and that the license is the instrument through which that sovereignty is preserved across use.
Intellectual property law needs to be extended to recognize cultural property as sovereign H. The current intellectual property regime protects individual creation through copyright and patent but has no adequate mechanism for protecting the accumulated creative knowledge of a people across generations. The Navajo weaver can't patent her ancestors' patterns. The farmer can't copyright seed knowledge that predates the patent system by a century. The blues musician's relationship to a tradition isn't protectable under a regime built for individual authorship. The framework's sovereignty principle applies to all of these, and the legal scholars who take this work forward will need to build the argument for a cultural property license — a mechanism by which communities hold sovereign authority over the accumulated H of their people and grant or withhold access on terms they set.
Treaty law is the most urgent gap. The sovereignty principle established in this framework isn't new to indigenous peoples. It's the principle their nations have asserted for as long as extraction economies have existed, and it's the principle that treaty law has repeatedly failed to honor. The framework's contribution here isn't to resolve what treaty law has failed to resolve — that's the work of indigenous legal scholars, advocates, and the nations themselves — but to establish that the sovereignty principle applies with full force to cultural knowledge, land use patterns, and accumulated participation. The settlement standard that governs legitimate financial transactions applies to every transaction that organized that participation without a license. The financial infrastructure that companies depend on must carry value that can demonstrate clean origin. That standard applies to value extracted from indigenous participation without sovereign agreement, and legal scholars and advocates who take this work forward will find the framework already contains the argument they need.
Contract law needs to be extended to close the gap between nominal consent and sovereign agreement. The current contract regime recognizes consent as the basis of legitimate exchange but has no adequate mechanism for distinguishing between consent that was genuine — voluntary, informed, with survivable refusal — and consent that was extracted under conditions that made refusal impossible. The terms of service that govern digital participation are contracts in name and extraction instruments in practice. This is because the conditions under which they were agreed to didn't include survivable refusal or genuine legal standing. Extending the framework into contract law means building the legal argument that λ is a condition of valid contract — that an agreement reached under conditions where refusal wasn't survivable isn't a contract in the sense the law intends and can't be enforced as one.
These aren't small extensions. Each one is a body of work in itself. Each one requires legal scholars, advocates, and jurists who understand both the existing law and the sovereignty principle the framework establishes. The framework doesn't do that work; it opens it, names it, and hands it off.
The jurisdictional gap is real and it's large. The digital framework is complete and the non-digital extension is the next body of work. The people who build from here will find that the foundation is already in place — the sovereignty principle, the license, the legitimacy gate, the settlement standard — and that what remains is the application of those principles to the bodies of law that govern the participation of people who have never touched a screen and whose sovereignty is no less real for that.
The framework is for everyone. The work of making it reach everyone has not yet been done.
2026