For Claire Ackerman, Chief Executive · Private discussion paper
Keep Fingertips open. Build a front door with a bell on it.
The question on the table is whether to put a gate, a login or a payment wall, around Fingertips, the Society's one open layer, because AI systems are helping themselves to material given away for nothing. The concern is sound. The instrument is wrong for it. The paid material is what is leaking, the cheap protections have never been tried, and the assistants reading the Society today cannot pay it because nothing exists for them to pay into. This page is the short edition of the full paper; every figure here rests on a numbered assumption in its appendices.
Three things to back, in this order
Keep Fingertips open, because it is the one layer working for the Society and the only rung an assistant can start on. Close the routes by which paid material already leaves the building for nothing, a fortnight of somebody's attention and a legal review. Build a proper front door with a bell on it, so an assistant can ask the Society directly and be answered, with the Society's name, its edition and the date of the last check on every answer that leaves.
The cheap half can start this month. It needs no supplier, no new budget line and no decision from anybody but the Chief Executive. Everything after it waits on evidence, and the paper says what evidence, and when it would arrive.
What is true on the ground today
The free layer works as designed. The paid layer is the one leaking.
Almost nothing in the numbered catalogue is public. Fingertips, 1,003 short technical articles at clean addresses, is open on purpose and is meant to be the top of the funnel into membership and the reports. It is also, verifiably, already inside the language models behind the assistants. Meanwhile the flagship £110 report sits unlocked on servers in Bulgaria and France, and the cheap controls that shape what happens next have never been tried.
| The control | What it is | As found | The fix, in Phase 0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| The robots file a note on the door | A plain text file at the top of the site telling visiting software what it may and may not read. A note on the door rather than a lock. | The stock text the website software wrote, about shopping carts and form uploads, silent on the AI companies' crawlers. | Search yes, live answers yes, training no. Half a day |
| The rights pages nothing on the wall | A terms of use page, a copyright statement, a licence, a text and data mining policy. Text and data mining is how an AI model is built from what it reads. | Nowhere across the site's 69 pages. | Roughly a thousand words, an explicit reservation against training without a licence, a rights and takedown address. A day and a half plus legal review |
| The edge the porch before the front door | The layer that meets every request before it reaches the website. | Pointed the wrong way round: every named AI crawler tested was served without complaint, and a request that looked like an ordinary person using Chrome was refused. | A support conversation with the host. A day plus queue time |
| The legacy estate the forgotten second copy | The pages the current site replaced in July 2025, still up, serving the same Fingertips material at a second set of addresses with no gate on any of them. | One address takes a sequential document number and returns a clean printable article. No login, no rate limit, nothing watching. Outside every control on the new site | Redirect each old address to its new equivalent, or retire it. Comes before any other spend. One to two days |
| The archive already gone | The Internet Archive holds 91,183 captures of the site across 28 years, outside the Society's control and in practice permanent. | Sets the goal for protection work: shape what happens next, never retrieve what has gone. | None. Not recoverable |
What a leaked copy cannot carry, and the Society can sell
- Edition and supersession. A copied file carries no notice of which edition it is, and no copy can refuse to serve itself as current once it is not. The Bulgarian copy of the flagship is the 2003 third edition; the Society is on the fourth.
- Amendments and the standard that moved. No amendment history travels with a copy, and nothing in it links to the standard that has changed underneath it.
- Provenance and currency. Who stands behind it, when it was last checked, whether a professional can rely on it. The Technical Committee's judgement answers those questions and has never been readable by a machine.
View one · the knowledge system
Two customers, one knowledge system
The Society now serves two kinds of reader: people, and AI assistants acting for people. It can serve and charge the first. It has no way to serve or to charge the second. Amber is what the Society builds and sells. Teal is what exists and stays open. Grey is the three systems the Society runs today, which share no customer record. Navy is who it all serves.
A gate would close the open pages to people and assistants alike and open nothing in their place. The channel opens a door the Society can charge at.
Swipe diagram →The bell is the Model Context Protocol
Shortened everywhere to MCP: the agreed way an assistant asks an outside source directly, which the major assistants already use. An assistant coming through that door is not reading a page and guessing. It asks for named things, and every answer carries the same fields whoever asks.
Six steps of access decide the depth
From public and registered at the bottom to corporate and commercial at the top. What a reader or an organisation has paid for decides what an assistant may see. Public tier first, and nothing labelled member until identity is real.
The answer for what is not entitled is not a refusal
It names what exists without disclosing it, carries the edition and the price, and gives the assistant a way to register, join or buy and resume the work. The single most commercially important response in the design.
The case in numbers
A cost, a return, and the comparison with the gate
Three scenarios, conservative, base and ambitious, run to the 2029 financial year against a £1.8m turnover anchor. Every return is stated after subtracting what the new model takes from lines the Society already earns. These figures are modelled from stated assumptions, not observed in the Society's accounts, and the full paper says so wherever they appear.
| The line | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| One-off build, FY2027 | £169,500 to £407,500 | The protective controls, the machine channel, the tagging of the content, the rights audit, and the largest single line, making the members' portal, the bookshop and the content store agree about who a member is and what they have paid for. Released in stages, never at once. |
| Recurring cost, from FY2028 | £66,000 to £120,600 a year | Hosting and the front-of-site subscription, two days a month of engineering, keeping the content current, and a product owner three days a week. |
| Base case, net new revenue at FY2029 | £308,500 a year | New and professional-tier members, about twenty-five organisation-wide licences, two software vendors, and the publications, training and advisory work they pull through. |
| Gate Fingertips, net at FY2029 | Minus £40,100 to minus £118,500 a year | The advertising on the open pages, the memberships and publications that visitors who never arrive would have bought, and the cost of running the gate, against the few members the gate itself converts. |
| Distance between the two futures | About £295,000 a year | The gap at FY2029 on the middle of each range; a sixth of turnover on the £1.8m anchor. Halving both the number of licences and their price still leaves the base case at £233,500 against a gate that loses money. |
| Base case cash breakeven | Two to three months into FY2030 | The point at which the new revenue has repaid the build cost and the running costs to date. |
| The conservative case | Loses about £30,000 a year | A thin market, no vendor deal and few licences, at the FY2029 run rate. The protective work still pays for itself. |
What the gate buys, against that
Small and hard to undo. It is prospective only: it does nothing about the copies of the flagship report sitting unlocked on foreign servers, nothing about the second, forgotten copy of Fingertips still live on the Society's own old system, and it removes advertising somebody is paying £350 a month for this month.
The front door, from the assistant's side · illustrative
What a member's assistant sees once the bell is answered
An engineer asks the assistant they already use at work. The assistant rings the Society's bell, asks for named things, and is answered with the Society's name, the edition and the date of the last check on the answer. Where the question reaches paid guidance the answer names it, with the price and the route, without disclosing it. The tool names are working names from the paper's technical appendix; the conversation is invented to show the shape.
The Society's name on every answer
Source, edition, date last reviewed, whether a newer edition has replaced it, the standard referenced and the required attribution, whoever is asking. That is the product no leaked copy and no anonymous model can supply.
The buyer changes
The man pasting a leaked copy into his firm's Copilot has put a document of unknown edition and origin into his employer's workflow. That employer is the buyer this channel is built for: a conversation about their liability rather than the Society's copyright.
The leak decays on its own
Sell continuing access, with amendments and supersession delivered as they happen, and a leaked copy starts decaying the day it is uploaded, where today it holds full value for a decade. The Society controls the half-life of its own material, and has set it to infinity.
View two · the roadmap and its gates
Cheap and reversible first. Expensive and committing last, behind a test the Society can afford to fail.
Left to right is time. Every phase has to produce something before the next one starts, and each is worth doing even if the next is never approved. Revenue appears only in the last two phases, deliberately. The large build waits behind paid pilots or named buyers, so the moment at which the Society could be wrong about the market is also the moment at which stopping costs least.
Failing the gate cheaply in month six costs the cheap package and the first slice of the channel. Failing it expensively in year two, after the large build, costs the whole of it.
Swipe roadmap →The cheap package, baseline first. Four weeks of access logs by kind of visitor, the robots file and content signal, the terms and rights pages, the legacy estate closed, the edge diagnosed with the host. Around nine implementer days, no new supplier, no new budget line. What it buys is the loss it avoids.
The floor the channel stands on. The edge moved to a platform that tells search, agent and training traffic apart and enforces the policy rather than requesting it, then rate limits by page class, expiring download links and crawler logging behind it. Twelve to fifteen implementer days plus a modest subscription. Alongside it, the market study: six weeks, named accounts, twenty to thirty interviews, real price tests and real paid-pilot offers.
The first phase that earns. The identity and entitlement layer as a thin service in front of the three systems, answering one question: who is this and what may they see. The channel's public and registered tiers on Fingertips content, public tier first. Fingertips tagged with edition, date, supersession and standards referenced. The rights audit concludes.
Only this commits the Society to the platform. Member, professional and corporate tiers enforced against real entitlement, enterprise provisioning through customers' own identity systems, the commercial licence conversations, the rest of the catalogue structured through the review cycle, and the answer service as the visible product on top.
The evidence test before Phase 3
Three to five paid pilots, or £50,000 to £100,000 of contracted and near-contracted demand from buyers who can be named, with a cost of serving it the Society can live with. A working prototype is not evidence of demand, and neither is enthusiasm in a meeting.
Order matters more than pace
- Content structure before any tier implying authority, because a channel serving untagged content into a tier labelled member carries the Society's name at the moment it is wrong.
- Identity before paid tiers are enforced, or the bookshop's honour system has simply moved into a new channel instead of being closed.
- The edge before the channel, which sits behind it by design.
- The rights audit alongside all of it, because it gates the licensing line and moves at the speed of correspondence.
Decisions recommended now
Seven, and no more. Six cost nothing beyond attention.
Each either costs nothing or buys the evidence for the next. None commits the Society to the full programme, and none forecloses the gate: the ability to protect specific premium classes is kept intact throughout. The cheap and reversible ones can be taken without the room; only the build money need go to Council.
What only the Chief Executive can supply, and what it replaces: the Fingertips analytics, the real revenue split by line, the advertising occupancy, a dated member count with the corporate price bands, the finished member survey, and the appetite for touching the bookshop and the portal. Each replaces an assumption in the paper with a fact.
- Do not gate Fingertips at this stage. Keep the open layer while its value as an acquisition route is measured rather than assumed.No cost
- Adopt the working position and say it out loud: open front door, governed depth, paid machine access.No cost
- Approve the ninety-day protection work. Nine implementer days and a legal review; closes the back door, the missing terms page and the crawler policy this month.No supplier, no budget line
- Commission the market study. Six weeks, named accounts, real price tests and real paid-pilot offers.Society data, not money
- Approve a bounded first version of the machine channel. Public tier only, fixed scope, a named owner, no commitment to the full platform.First slice of £45,000 to £110,000
- Require every item exposed to a machine to carry its status, owner, rights and commercial class first. The failure that matters is the Society's name on an out of date answer.No cost
- Require a revised business case before commercial scale. The same evidence test that sits before Phase 3, put in the minutes so it is real.No cost