Legal and Intellectual Property Notice

1. The Principal. This website and its content are owned and operated by Paul F. Accornero (the “Principal”), operating commercially under the research and advisory trading name The AI Praxis™, a sole proprietorship (Ditta Individuale) organized under the laws of Italy. The practice is not a limited liability company. Tax residence and registration are in Italy. The applicable VAT identification number is P.IVA IT05595640268. The certified electronic mail address (PEC) for formal legal service is paul.accornero@pec.it.

2. Nature of the Entity. Because the practice is a sole proprietorship, all contracts, intellectual property licences, and binding commitments referenced on this website are entered into and legally executed by the Principal personally. References on this site to “The AI Praxis,” “we,” or “the practice” mean the Principal acting in that capacity. The primary domain for this practice is paulaccornero.com.

3. Independence and Capacity. Paul F. Accornero is an independent researcher, author, and adviser. He is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or acting on behalf of any current or previous employer. He does not disclose, and this site does not contain, any confidential or proprietary information belonging to any current or previous employer. Where research draws on the Principal’s prior three decades of commercial experience, it is presented only in anonymized, non-identifying form, so that no current or previous employer, and no client, can be identified. All research, frameworks, and diagnostic outputs published here are produced using the Principal’s own resources and publicly available information.

4. Single Governing Terms. This Legal Terms and Intellectual Property Notice is the single, definitive, and complete set of terms and conditions for Paul F. Accornero and The AI Praxis. It is the governing document. It sets the terms on which every platform surface, publication, diagnostic tool, report, communication, and professional service offered by the Principal may be accessed and used. No individual surface, product, or service operates under a separate or competing set of general terms. Where a reference, footer, link, email, report, or other document published by the Principal points to his “terms,” “terms and conditions,” “legal terms,” or “IP and legal” notice, it refers to this page, which is maintained as the authoritative and current source.

5. Platform and Service Coverage. These terms, and the rights, restrictions, and notices in them, apply in full and without limitation across every surface and service on which the Principal publishes, distributes, presents, or delivers his work, including but not limited to:

• this website, paulaccornero.com;
• theaipraxis.com (legacy domain, during the transition period, with traffic redirecting to paulaccornero.com);
• the Substack publication at theaipraxis.substack.com;
• the LinkedIn Newsletter and the LinkedIn profile published under paulaccornero;
• the SSRN author page (SSRN author identifier 8182896) and all academic publications and working papers posted there or in any academic repository;
• the Algorithmic Readiness Audit (ARA) landing page, the ARA diagnostic tool and subscription service, the Algorithmic Integrity Scorecard, and the output of every other diagnostic tool;
• all advisory, consulting, and research engagements undertaken by the Principal;
• all downloadable reports, scorecards, white papers, and briefing documents;
• email newsletters and direct email content;
• podcast appearances and produced audio or video content; and
• speaking engagements, conference materials, and presentation decks.

Definition: “the Content”: All text, frameworks, named constructs, reports, scorecards, diagnostic outputs, images, audio, and video that the Principal publishes or delivers across these surfaces and services. Use of any of these surfaces or services constitutes acceptance of these terms.

6. Relationship to Commercial Contracts. A specific commercial engagement may require its own written contract, for example a paid subscription to the Algorithmic Readiness Audit, an advisory engagement letter, or an intellectual property licence. Any such contract addresses only the commercial particulars of that engagement, such as fees, payment, deliverables, service levels, and term. It is entered into subject to these terms and incorporates them by reference. It is not a separate or alternative set of general terms. In the event of any inconsistency between a commercial contract and these terms on a matter of intellectual property, permitted use, data, artificial intelligence restrictions, or scope of practice, these terms prevail, unless the commercial contract expressly states otherwise and is signed by the Principal.

7. Persons Doing Business With the Principal. By accessing or using any surface listed in clause 5, you agree to these terms as they apply to the use of that surface. In these terms, a “counterparty” means any person or organization that does business with the Principal in either direction, whether as a client or other party to whom the Principal provides advisory, research, or diagnostic services, or as a supplier, vendor, contractor, or service provider that provides goods or services to the Principal. The confidentiality, limited-licence, and trade-secret provisions in Parts IV and V apply to a counterparty in either direction where that counterparty has been given notice of these terms and has accepted them, whether by accepting them at the point of sign-up or subscription, or by entering into a signed agreement that incorporates them by reference. For any substantive engagement in either direction, the Principal will ordinarily require a signed non-disclosure agreement and engagement or supply letter, which are the governing instruments for that engagement. These terms set the baseline that the Principal relies on when he refers a counterparty to this page, and they operate in addition to, and not instead of, those signed agreements.

8. Engagement Restriction Currently in Force. Paul F. Accornero does not accept, and will not enter into, any advisory, consulting, or paid diagnostic engagement with any manufacturer of consumer brands in small domestic appliances or consumer kitchen appliances, where that manufacturer operates or sells in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, or the United States of America. For the avoidance of doubt, the restriction applies to such manufacturers and does not by itself restrict the Principal from working with retailers, marketplaces, platforms, or other parties that are not manufacturers in the restricted categories.

9. Geographic Carve-Out. Where such a manufacturer operates exclusively outside the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States, for example a small domestic appliance manufacturer active only in its home market or in non-EU, non-UK, non-Swiss, and non-US export markets, an engagement may be considered, subject to the Principal’s separate written confirmation.

10. Application Across All Services. This restriction is operational and non-negotiable. It applies to every service the Principal offers, including the Algorithmic Readiness Audit and any other diagnostic or advisory product. Where a service has its own sign-up or eligibility process, that process gives effect to this restriction, for example the category eligibility confirmation required before subscribing to the Algorithmic Readiness Audit. The restriction itself is established and governed by these terms.

11. Confidential Information. Confidential Information means the Principal’s non-public information that is disclosed or made available to a counterparty in connection with an engagement, a prospective engagement, or the supply of goods or services, in any form. It includes the Principal’s business, technical, commercial, pricing, and methodological information, his frameworks and scoring rubrics, and the materials described in Part V. It does not include information that is or becomes public through no fault of the counterparty, was lawfully known to the counterparty before disclosure, is independently developed by the counterparty without use of the Principal’s Confidential Information, or is lawfully received by the counterparty from a third party without restriction.

12. Confidentiality Obligation. A counterparty will keep the Principal’s Confidential Information confidential, will use it only for the purpose of the engagement or supply, will protect it with no less than reasonable care, and will disclose it only to those of its employees and advisers who need it for that purpose and who are bound by equivalent obligations. The counterparty is responsible for any breach of these obligations by its employees or advisers as if it were its own.

13. No Use for AI or Machine-Learning Training. A counterparty will not use the Principal’s Confidential Information, or any of the Content, to train, fine-tune, or otherwise develop any artificial-intelligence or machine-learning system.

14. The Principal’s Handling of Counterparty Information. Where a counterparty shares its own information with the Principal, the Principal keeps that information confidential and uses it only in anonymized, non-identifying form for research, writing, and case-study purposes, consistent with Part XI.

15. Intellectual Property Ownership and No Implied Licence. The Principal’s pre-existing frameworks, instruments, and methodologies, including without limitation The Algorithmic Readiness Audit™, Agent Intent Optimisation (AIO)®, and The Four Ds Framework®, together with the registered and pending rights set out in Part V, are and remain his exclusive property. No rights in them are granted to a counterparty except as separately agreed in writing. Nothing done in the course of an engagement or supply is work made for hire, and the Principal retains all right, title, and interest in his pre-existing and independently developed intellectual property.

16. Limited Licence for Deliverables. Where the Principal provides a report, scorecard, diagnostic output, or other deliverable, the recipient is granted a limited, non-transferable, non-sublicensable licence to use that deliverable for the recipient’s own internal evaluation and decision-making only. The recipient may not redistribute, publish, resell, or create derivative works from the deliverable, and may not use it to build or improve a competing product or service, without a separate written licence.

17. Return or Destruction. On the Principal’s written request, a counterparty will return or destroy the Principal’s Confidential Information, subject to copies required by law or routine backup, and will certify destruction in writing on request.

19. Separate Signed Agreements. For any actual engagement or supply, the Principal will ordinarily require a signed non-disclosure agreement and a signed engagement or supply agreement, which govern that relationship in detail and prevail over this Part to the extent of any inconsistency. This Part provides the baseline that applies to anyone who does business with the Principal and is referred to these terms. It is not a substitute for those signed agreements.

20. Copyright. The foundational manuscript underlying this body of work is registered with the United States Copyright Office under registration number TXu 2-507-027 (effective 12 July 2025, Paul F. Accornero). A wider copyright portfolio is registered or pending at the United States Copyright Office, encompassing further manuscript drafts, academic working papers, and software and code registrations for the Principal’s diagnostic tools and engines. All original content published on this website is Copyright 2026 Paul F. Accornero. All rights reserved.

21. Trademarks. The following marks are registered trademarks: The Shopper Schism® and Agent Intent Optimisation (AIO)® are registered in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. The Algorithmic Shopper®, Algorithmic Readiness®, and The 4 Ds® are registered in the United Kingdom. In total, five marks are UK-registered and two are EU-registered as of the date of this notice. Further applications for these and additional marks are pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other jurisdictions; no US mark is registered at the date of this notice.

The following marks are the subject of pending trademark applications in the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States, or a combination of these, and are used with the unregistered trademark symbol pending registration: Agentic Commerce™, The Algorithmic Readiness Audit™, The Four Ds Framework™, Share of Algorithmic Choice™, Agent Decision Preference Stack™, Algorithmic NPS™ (ANPS™), the Algorithmic Integrity Scorecard™, and The AI Praxis™. The AI Praxis™ is used as an unregistered trademark only.

22. Proprietary Frameworks. The following proprietary frameworks, methods, named constructs, and findings are protected as original works of authorship under copyright and, where applicable, as trade secrets: The Great Decoupling, The Trust Paradox, The Automaton Economy, The Governance Gauntlet, Delegated Consumption, The API Call Model, Agent-Centred Design, From Relational Capital to Systemic Reliability, the Algorithmic Net Promoter Score (Algorithmic NPS), and The Innovation Systems Architect. Nothing in this paragraph creates or asserts a trademark registration that does not exist.

23. Trade Secret Layer. The proprietary frameworks, scoring rubrics, weighting criteria, calibration benchmarks, audit pipeline architecture, and implementation methodologies that sit behind the published work are confidential and are protected under both copyright law and trade secret law in every applicable jurisdiction, including the European Union (Directive 2016/943), Italy (Legislative Decree 63/2018), the United States (including the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016), and jurisdictions across the Asia Pacific region. These materials are disclosed only under a written non-disclosure agreement. A person or organization that enters into business or an engagement with the Principal, on notice of and acceptance of these terms or under a signed agreement, accepts these confidentiality and trade-secret obligations, treats the protected materials as confidential, and shall not reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive the protected implementation layer. Nothing published on this site discloses that protected implementation layer.

24. Diagnostic Tool Outputs. Reports, scores, and other outputs generated by the Algorithmic Readiness Audit, the Algorithmic Integrity Scorecard, and any other diagnostic tool on this site are produced using the Principal’s proprietary methodology and remain the property of the Principal. A user who receives such an output is granted a limited, non-transferable licence to use that output for internal evaluation purposes only. The user may not redistribute the output, reverse engineer the tool or its methodology, or use the output to develop a competing product or service.

Diagnostic outputs are descriptive, not prescriptive, and are generated by computational analysis of publicly available signals. They are provided “as is,” without warranty of any kind. Any decision a user takes in reliance on an output, including changes to a website, content, bot-management policy, or marketing approach, is the user’s sole responsibility. The Principal does not warrant that following any observation in an output will produce any specific commercial outcome. Data collected through a diagnostic interaction may be retained in anonymized and aggregated form for the research purposes described in Part XI.

25. No Professional Advice. Nothing on this site, and nothing in any diagnostic output, report, publication, or communication from the Principal, constitutes legal, tax, accounting, financial, regulatory, or investment advice. Paul F. Accornero is not a qualified lawyer, accountant, tax adviser, or licensed financial or investment adviser in any jurisdiction. Any person relying on this work must obtain their own independent legal, business, and financial advice from an appropriately qualified and licensed professional in the relevant jurisdiction.

26. Warranty Disclaimer. The Content and outputs on this site are provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranty of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law.

27. Limitation of Liability. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the Principal is not liable for any indirect, consequential, special, punitive, or exemplary loss, including loss of profits, revenue, business opportunity, goodwill, or data, arising out of access to or use of this site or its Content. Nothing in these terms limits or excludes any liability that cannot be limited or excluded as a matter of applicable law, including liability for fraud, for fraudulent misrepresentation, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Liability under any specific paid engagement is governed by the limitation-of-liability terms of the signed agreement for that engagement.

28. User Indemnity. A user will indemnify the Principal against any third-party claim, and any reasonable legal cost, arising from that user’s breach of these terms, misuse of the Content, or infringement of the Principal’s intellectual property rights.

29. Permitted Uses. You may read and view the Content on this site; cite it with proper attribution; share links to it; quote reasonable extracts with attribution, consistent with fair dealing and fair use; and reference it for academic purposes.

30. Prohibited Uses. Without a written licence you may not reproduce or republish the Content for commercial purposes; create derivative works from it; remove or alter copyright, trademark, or attribution notices; frame or mirror the site; or use any of the registered or claimed marks in a manner likely to cause confusion or imply endorsement. You may not scrape or harvest the Content in order to build or contribute to an artificial-intelligence or machine-learning training corpus, as restricted in Part X. For the avoidance of doubt, this clause does not restrict the crawling or indexing of the Content for search, which is expressly permitted under clause 35.

31. Commercial Appropriation. Use of the Principal’s named frameworks, methods, or constructs in consulting deliverables, training programs, commercial publications, or product features constitutes commercial use that requires a written licence from Paul F. Accornero. This applies to use of the substance of a framework, not merely to use of its label. Renaming or paraphrasing a framework while reproducing its distinctive substance does not avoid the licensing requirement.

This clause extends expressly to artificial intelligence and large language model use cases. A company or individual that uses the Principal’s frameworks, constructs, or methods to design, build, configure, prompt, or train an AI system, model, agent, or product engages in commercial use that requires a written licence. Forensic provenance for these frameworks is established by the registration TXu 2-507-027, the SSRN publication record, the version-controlled manuscripts, and the trademark filings.

32. AI-Generated Derivative Content. It is the Principal’s position that content generated by an AI tool that reproduces the distinctive substance of the Principal’s named frameworks, constructs, or methods is a derivative use that requires a licence, even where the AI tool was not directly trained on the Principal’s text, to the extent protectable under applicable law and these terms. The relevant test is whether the output reproduces the distinctive substance of a protected framework, not whether the underlying text was ingested.

33. Licensing Categories. Written licences are available, and required, for the following categories of use, among others: corporate training programs; consulting and advisory deliverables; commercial publications; conference and event materials; software, applications, and product features; academic programs offered on a commercial basis; AI and machine learning training datasets and AI system development; diagnostic tool outputs used beyond internal evaluation; API access; and bulk or enterprise use.

Licensing inquiries should be directed to the contact address in Part XVII. Terms, scope, and fees are determined on a case-by-case basis and are confirmed in writing.

34. Training Restriction. All Content published across the surfaces and services listed in clause 5 is Human-Generated Original Work. Paul F. Accornero expressly reserves all rights with respect to text and data mining for the purpose of training artificial intelligence systems, and with respect to the use of his Content to build or improve AI or machine-learning models. Without a written licence, it is prohibited to:

• use any of the Content to train, fine-tune, pre-train, or otherwise develop any artificial intelligence, machine learning, or large language model;
• include any of the Content in a training dataset or training corpus, in whole or in part; or
• use any of the Content to generate model-trained derivative outputs that reproduce the substance of the Principal’s protected frameworks.

Within the European Union, this is an express reservation of rights for text and data mining for commercial purposes within the meaning of Article 4(3) of EU Directive 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Outside the European Union, the same restriction applies as a contractual condition of access and use. This reservation is additionally expressed through machine-readable signals on the site, which may include a text-and-data-mining reservation signal and directives addressed to AI-training crawlers. Those signals are configured to reserve the Content against AI training while continuing to permit search-engine and AI-search indexing and citation as set out in clause 35. This Part operates together with the Commercial Appropriation clause (31) and the AI-Generated Derivative Content clause (32): the training prohibition and the derivative-work licensing requirement are independent and cumulative protections.

35. Search, Indexing, and Citation Expressly Permitted. For the avoidance of doubt, this Part restricts one thing only: the use of the Principal’s Content as training data to build or improve AI or machine-learning models. It does not restrict, and the Principal expressly permits, the discovery, indexing, crawling, search, surfacing, and citation of his Content. His Content may be indexed and crawled by search engines and by AI-powered search and answer systems; surfaced in search results, AI overviews, and answer engines; quoted with attribution; and linked to. The discoverability of the Principal’s work, by both human and machine readers, is intended and welcomed. What is reserved is the separate act of using the Content to train a model, not the act of finding, reading, indexing, or citing it.

36. Research Use of Collected Information. Paul F. Accornero may use information that is collected across any surface or service listed in clause 5, or generated through any engagement or work he undertakes, for his own research, writing, books, and academic publications.

37. Anonymisation. All such information is anonymized, using recognized anonymisation practices, before it informs any published or public output, so that, to the best of the Principal’s reasonable efforts, no company, organization, or individual is identifiable from that output. Published and public material will contain no identifying case studies, no named examples, and no identifiable data drawn from any engagement, client, or platform interaction.

38. Aggregated Academic Research. Anonymized and aggregated data may feed the Principal’s ongoing academic research under standard academic ethics protocols. Use of data in this form is consistent with the data protection commitments in Part XV, including the principles of purpose limitation, data minimization, and the recognition that fully anonymized aggregate data is not personal data once it can no longer be linked to an identified or identifiable person.

39. Attribution Format. Citations to this work should follow APA 7th edition style.

For the forthcoming book:

General attribution: Copyright 2026 Paul F. Accornero, The AI Praxis (paulaccornero.com). Used with permission. The book is forthcoming and under contract; it is not yet published.

40. Enforcement. The Principal reserves the right to monitor for infringement and to enforce these rights. Available remedies include, without limitation: takedown notices under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act and equivalent procedures in other jurisdictions; the commencement of civil proceedings; actual damages, and statutory damages where the relevant work was timely registered, including under 17 U.S.C. section 504 where US law applies; injunctive relief; and the recovery of reasonable legal costs. These remedies are cumulative and not exclusive. The Principal reserves the right to pursue all remedies available under the applicable copyright, trademark, and trade secret law of any relevant jurisdiction, in any court of competent jurisdiction.

41. Billing and Invoicing. The Principal operates as an Italian sole proprietorship (Ditta Individuale), VAT number P.IVA IT05595640268. All fees for advisory, subscription, and diagnostic services are invoiced in accordance with Italian tax law, including, where required, as electronic invoices through the Italian Sistema di Interscambio (SdI). Unless otherwise stated, fees are quoted exclusive of value added tax (VAT), and VAT is applied where due under Italian and European Union law, including the reverse-charge mechanism for eligible cross-border business clients. Payment processing for online subscriptions is handled by the Principal’s payment processor under Italian P.IVA invoicing.

European Union (GDPR). For users and data subjects in the European Union and the European Economic Area, processing is conducted in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (the General Data Protection Regulation) and applicable Italian data protection law. The Principal acts as data controller for the personal data he collects through this site. Where personal data is transferred outside the EEA, the transfer is made under an appropriate safeguard, such as the Standard Contractual Clauses or an adequacy decision. Data subjects have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection, and the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

United Kingdom (UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018). For users and data subjects in the United Kingdom, processing is conducted in accordance with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, which apply separately from the EU regime following the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. UK data subjects have rights equivalent to those described above and may complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office. The Principal’s UK registered trademarks include The Shopper Schism®, Agent Intent Optimisation (AIO)®, The Algorithmic Shopper®, Algorithmic Readiness®, and The 4 Ds®, all registered with the UK Intellectual Property Office.

Brazil (LGPD). For users and data subjects in Brazil, processing is conducted in accordance with Law No. 13,709/2018, the Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD). Paul F. Accornero conducts commercial activities in Brazil, including speaking, research, and advisory work, and processes the personal data of Brazilian data subjects in accordance with the LGPD principles and data subject rights, including the rights of confirmation, access, correction, anonymization, portability, and deletion.

United States (CCPA, CPRA, and federal IP law). For California residents, processing is conducted in accordance with the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act. California residents have the rights to know, to delete, to correct, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information; the Principal does not sell personal information. United States copyright law (Title 17 of the United States Code) applies to the registered work TXu 2-507-027, and United States trademark applications are pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Australia (Privacy Act 1988). For users and data subjects in Australia, processing is conducted in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles. The Principal undertakes academic and speaking engagements connected with Australian universities and processes the personal data of Australian individuals in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles.

Mandatory Local Law. The choice of the law of England and Wales in Part XVII is the primary governing law of these terms. Nothing in these terms removes the protection of any mandatory consumer protection or data protection law of the country in which a user is habitually resident, where such law applies and cannot be derogated from by agreement. Those mandatory local protections apply in addition to these terms.

42. Changes to These Terms. The Principal may amend these terms from time to time. Amendments take effect when posted on this page with an updated version date. Continued use of any surface or service after an amendment is posted constitutes acceptance of the amended terms. The version published on this page is the governing version.

43. Severability. If any provision of these terms is held invalid, unlawful, or unenforceable, that provision is severed to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions continue in full force and effect.

44. No Waiver. A failure or delay by the Principal in exercising any right under these terms is not a waiver of that right, and no single or partial exercise of a right prevents any further exercise of it.

45. Entire Agreement. These terms are the entire agreement between the user and the Principal in relation to the use of the surfaces and services, and supersede any prior understanding on that subject, except for a signed agreement for a specific engagement, which prevails for that engagement as set out in clause 6.

46. Force Majeure. The Principal is not liable for any failure or delay in the availability of a surface or service that is caused by events beyond his reasonable control, including network, hosting, or third-party platform failures.

47. Third-Party Links. This site links to third-party sites and platforms, including Substack, LinkedIn, and SSRN. The Principal is not responsible for the content, terms, or privacy practices of any third-party site.

48. Age and Capacity. By using this site you confirm that you are at least 18 years old, or the age of legal majority in your jurisdiction, and that you have the legal capacity to accept these terms.

49. Privacy and Cookies. The Principal’s processing of personal data, and the use of cookies and similar technologies on this site, are described in a separate Privacy and Cookie Policy, which forms part of these terms by reference. Where required, cookies that are not strictly necessary are used only with consent.

50. Assignment. The Principal may assign or transfer his rights and obligations under these terms, including to a successor entity in the event that the practice is incorporated or its business is transferred. A user may not assign its rights under these terms without the Principal’s written consent.

51. Suspension and Termination of Access. The Principal may suspend or terminate any user’s access to a surface or service, in whole or in part, where that user breaches these terms or where required by law.

52. Notices. Formal legal notices to the Principal must be sent to the certified electronic mail (PEC) address in clause 1 or to the registered office in Part XVII. Notices to a user may be given to the email address the user has provided.