The LEF Engine — Licensing

Route 1 — Non-Exclusive Field License Considered

You receive the right to deploy the LEF Engine, or a specific deployment such as DCFN, within a defined field of use. Living Eden Frameworks retains ownership of all patents, the calibration corpus, and all other deployments. You are not the only licensee — other parties may hold licenses in different fields at the same time.

What this looks like in practice

• A research platform licenses DCFN for use in its scholarly discovery product.
• An academic publisher licenses the CTE framework for structural gap detection in its editorial workflow.
• A government technology integrator licenses LEF ISB for a specific state contract.
• A materials R&D firm licenses DCFN-Materials for use in its internal discovery pipeline.

Why this route is considered

Non-exclusive licensing preserves optionality. Multiple narrowly scoped non-exclusive licenses across different markets create more long-term value than a single broad exclusive arrangement.

Typical terms

• Annual licensing fee per field of use.
• Field of use defined narrowly and precisely.
• No right to sublicense.
• No right to assign without consent.
• Perpetual license back to Living Eden Frameworks for any improvements the licensee makes to the engine.

Start a Route 1 conversation: sales@livingedenframeworks.com

Route 3 — Deployment / Product License Default

If your users are comfortable logging into the DCFN portal and using the deployment directly, the most efficient path is a standard deployment license through the published tier structure or a negotiated product license built on the same framework. Route 3 is for customers who want to use a named deployment as a hosted product, not for partners who require programmatic access or private infrastructure.

You receive a license to use a specific deployment surface of the LEF Ai Engine — for example DCFN-Patents, DCFN-Research, DCFN-Bio, or another named deployment — as a product or feature within your own business. The deployment runs in Living Eden Frameworks' infrastructure. You are licensing the right to operate that deployment; you are not receiving the engine substrate itself.

What you get

• Access to the named deployment's ingestion pipeline.
• The deployment's output formats and artifacts.
• Hosted operation by Living Eden Frameworks during the term of the license; no container and no self-hosting requirement.
• The right to expose those outputs to your users inside your product or internal workflows, within a defined field of use.

What you do not get

• Any interest in the LEF Ai substrate, the patent portfolio, or the calibration corpus.
• A copy of the running engine build or a container image you can host yourself.
• Rights to build derivative engines or new DCFN-x deployments.
• Rights to other deployments beyond the one or ones named in the license.
• Engine Bridge outputs involving the licensed deployment; those require separate commercial terms.

Typical terms

• Flat-rate 12-month license tiers with defined run pools or usage ceilings.
• Narrowly defined field of use.
• Non-exclusive license, no sublicensing, and no assignment without consent.
• Perpetual license back to Living Eden Frameworks for improvements outside the licensee's field of use.

DCFN-Patents retail tiers under Route 3

For evaluators and internal teams that do not need API integration or a private enclave deployment, DCFN-Patents is sold on the published 12-month tier schedule. Retail-tier purchases are Route 3 licenses to operate DCFN-Patents within the customer's internal field of use. Mid-window top-up packs may be offered without restarting the original 12-month term.

Tier 1 data-feedback loop

Tier 1 runs include a data-feedback loop: anonymized signal from each run — corpus traversals, gap classifications, structural-void patterns — seeds back into LEF Ai Engine training, so the substrate that powers your next run is informed by every run that came before it. Customer portfolio content itself is not republished; what flows back is the engine's own structural read of how the run behaved against the corpus.

Flat-rate purchase posture

All Route 3 retail-tier DCFN-Patents purchases are flat-rate 12-month transactions, not auto-renewing subscriptions. This aligns with the procurement posture of legal and patent-attorney buyers and preserves an explicit re-up decision at the end of each term.

Route 4 — API / SaaS Module Partnership Preferred

A named deployment of the LEF Engine operates as a hosted module inside your platform. Your application calls a documented API, the engine runs in Living Eden Frameworks' infrastructure, and structured results are returned to your product for rendering inside your own UX.

This route is intended for established SaaS platforms embedding LEF capabilities into their own customer-facing product. It is not intended for internal-only use. If your team is comfortable using the DCFN portal directly, Route 3 is the better fit.

What you get

• Access to specific API methods tied to one or more named deployments.
• Programmatic triggering of runs and structured result retrieval.
• Service-level terms covering availability, rate limits, and versioning.
• Non-exclusive rights to expose features in your product that are powered by those API calls.
• Full artifact delivery per run. SaaS partners receive every produced artifact for a run at once (L1 landscape + every L2 memo + every provisional + cover note). Retail Tier 1 customers click through to select which L2 artifacts to purchase; Route 4 partners get the full set.

What you do not get

• Any rights in the LEF Ai substrate, patents, calibration corpus, or running engine builds.
• The right to host the engine yourself or create derivative engines.
• Any exclusivity in your market; Living Eden Frameworks may offer the same API to other qualified partners.
• Any right to present the API route as a substitute for internal-use public tiers.

Why this route exists

This route is for partners who need programmatic integration and full ownership of the user experience, but do not need the engine deployed inside their own confidential-compute environment.

Invitation-gated; reach sales@livingedenframeworks.com for an invite code.

Route 6 — Private Enclave JDA Preferred

Route 6 is reserved for institutional partners who require the DCFN substrate to run inside their own confidential-compute environment. This is the enclave route specifically. It is not the API / SaaS route. Partners who only need programmatic access through Living Eden Frameworks-hosted infrastructure should use Route 4.

A Route 6 partner receives a private deployment of the relevant DCFN substrate inside a trusted execution environment chosen by the partner, together with the engineering work required to integrate that private deployment to the partner's data shape and operational environment.

Private Enclave Deployment

The DCFN substrate deploys inside the partner's chosen Trusted Execution Environment, such as AWS Nitro Enclaves, GCP Confidential Space, or Azure Confidential VMs. This includes enclave deployment, attestation-policy configuration, partner-specific connector work, and dedicated engineering through production deployment.

Data Readiness Assessment (mandatory prerequisite)

Every Route 6 partnership begins with a paid Data Readiness Assessment engagement (pricing per the Commercial structure block above). The Assessment produces four deliverables:

• A scored data assessment across 12 dimensions.
• A gap analysis between the partner's current data state and an integration-ready state.
• A data formatting blueprint with concrete schema specifications for the connector.
• A complexity-tier assignment (Modern CDE / Legacy Standard / Legacy Heavy) with rationale, which determines the Annual Access Fee tier.

Operational telemetry (always-on)

To maintain service quality and diagnose processing failures, LEF collects operational telemetry for every Assessment and engine run: the processing stage reached, error classification, run duration, and assigned complexity tier. This telemetry contains no portfolio content — no patent identifiers, claim text, or document contents — and the partner's identity is one-way cryptographically hashed before storage. This collection is always-on and independent of the optional structural-pattern-sharing election, which is a separate opt-in that governs the sharing of structural portfolio patterns.

Three-Layer IP architecture (non-negotiable)

• Layer 1 — LEF Substrate Architecture: retained by Living Eden Frameworks LLC. The DCFN substrate, engine architecture, canonical-element graph, connector pattern library, and any improvements to them remain LEF-owned. The patent-protected mechanisms describing how the engine works. No license is granted to the substrate itself.
• Layer 2 — LEF Ai.E (the meta-engine): retained by Living Eden Frameworks LLC. LEF Ai.E is the self-evolving application that operates the Layer 1 substrate across every DCFN build. While Layer 1 describes the mechanisms, Layer 2 IS the running engine that executes them and continuously refines its own behavior across runs. Proprietary application, trade-secret implementation, and self-evolution behavior. No license is granted to LEF Ai.E at any tier or route.
• Layer 3 — Connector Instance License: the partner receives a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, paid-up, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the specific Connector Instance built for that partner under the JDA, solely within the scope of that partner's use of the DCFN substrate under the agreement and any successor agreement. The architectural patterns underlying the Connector Instance remain LEF-owned.

Cryptographic-erasure attestation at termination

At termination of the JDA, whether by expiry, breach, or mutual decision, the partner must provide cryptographic attestation that the DCFN substrate workload and the partner Connector Instance artifacts have been decommissioned. Failure to provide attestation is an uncapped liability carve-out in the JDA contract.

AI substrate election

Until the cross-substrate benchmark program is complete, all Route 6 JDA deployments run against Anthropic Claude as the AI substrate. When the election capability ships, Route 6 partners may elect their AI substrate at JDA signature time, with that choice disclosed in the contract.

When this makes sense

This route is appropriate when partner data cannot leave the partner's environment, when enclave deployment is required by policy or procurement, or when the deployment will operate as internal infrastructure inside the partner's security boundary.