--- title: "Licence tier" summary: "A licence tier is the classification carried by an individual fact that determines what may lawfully be done with it — stored, redistributed, resold, or only shown once to the caller who asked." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/licence-tier last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # Licence tier > A licence tier is the classification carried by an individual fact that determines what may lawfully be done with it — stored, redistributed, resold, or only shown once to the caller who asked. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/licence-tier Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Data, licence and time ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under data, licence and time](https://entitybind.com/glossary#data). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What licence tier means A licence tier is a label carried by an individual fact, recording what its source permits: storage, redistribution, resale, or display to the caller and nothing more. It exists because company data arrives under wildly different terms. Companies House is published under the Open Government Licence, GLEIF under CC0, SEC EDGAR is US federal public domain, SIRENE is under Licence Ouverte 2.0. Other sources permit display but forbid warehousing, and others still are storable only while a commercial licence is live. A pipeline that mixes them and forgets which is which produces an asset nobody can safely resell. The insight that makes this tractable is that the licence belongs on the fact rather than on the dataset. A golden record is assembled from facts of several origins; if the tier is carried per fact, the survivorship rules that pick a winning value and everything the system writes out can honour it automatically, and the resale-safe subset is derivable rather than negotiated. Enforcement location is the question to ask a vendor. A licence honoured by a contract clause is honoured by whoever read the clause. A licence honoured by the write path is honoured by construction. Entity Bind models four tiers — open, licensed, pass-through, and a provisional 'needs check' marker for terms that have been read and found genuinely ambiguous — and enforces three of them on the persistence layer: saving an entity carrying a pass-through fact raises before any write happens. Nothing is currently held under a commercial data licence, and 'needs check' is never treated as open in code. Resale rights are offered on the open-licensed subset only, on the plan that carries them. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [Register coverage](https://entitybind.com/coverage): The registers the resolver reads, the licence each one publishes under, and how often a live entity's name is unique once it is tidied to a common form. - [Security and tenancy](https://entitybind.com/trust): Credentials, tenancy, retention and what is not held, answered before the questionnaire arrives. - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/use-cases/reference-data): Identifier crosswalks, where each fact came from, and what a cited fact has to carry to be usable downstream. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Pass-through data](https://entitybind.com/glossary/pass-through-data): Pass-through data is material a system may return to the caller who asked for it but may never retain — the tier where the difference between showing and storing is contractual rather than stylistic. - [Provenance](https://entitybind.com/glossary/provenance): Provenance is the record of where each individual value came from — which source, retrieved when, effective when — attached to the value itself rather than to the dataset as a whole. - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/glossary/reference-data): Reference data is the slow-changing, externally defined data used to classify and identify things — registers, code lists, identifier schemes — as opposed to the transactional data that refers to it. - [Golden record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/golden-record): A golden record is the single assembled view of an entity built by choosing one value per field from the records attached to it, ideally with the provenance of each choice carried alongside it. - [Survivorship](https://entitybind.com/glossary/survivorship): Survivorship is the set of rules that picks which value wins, field by field, when the records in a cluster disagree. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [United Kingdom](https://entitybind.com/coverage/united-kingdom) (Jurisdiction): Companies House under the Open Government Licence v3.0, storable and resellable. The register every published tier rate on this site was recorded on. - [France](https://entitybind.com/coverage/france) (Jurisdiction): SIRENE under Licence Ouverte 2.0, storable and resellable, and the only register that links a site to the legal entity running it. Bare names meet a ceiling. - [United States](https://entitybind.com/coverage/united-states) (Jurisdiction): There is no national company register in the United States. Coverage is Colorado, as public-domain bulk data, plus SEC EDGAR. Delaware publishes nothing. - [Norway](https://entitybind.com/coverage/norway) (Jurisdiction): Brønnøysund's Enhetsregisteret is the only register here publishing a telephone number, one of two publishing a website, with three insolvency flags. ## The other 6 terms on this shelf Facts have owners and dates. What may be stored, what may only be passed through, and what a date on a fact actually asserts. - [Pass-through data](https://entitybind.com/glossary/pass-through-data) - [Temporal facts](https://entitybind.com/glossary/temporal-facts) - [First seen](https://entitybind.com/glossary/first-seen) - [Last confirmed](https://entitybind.com/glossary/last-confirmed) - [PSC (person with significant control)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/psc) - [Beneficial ownership](https://entitybind.com/glossary/beneficial-ownership) Previous, alphabetically: [LEI (Legal Entity Identifier)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/lei) · Next, alphabetically: [m-probability](https://entitybind.com/glossary/m-probability) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/licence-tier, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.