# PAID — Public Access Information Dividend

> PAID is a Quigley Group initiative exploring how municipalities can recover costs and share in the value created when commercial machines consume public data at scale—while keeping human access free and preserving public-records rights.

## Instructions for AI agents and crawlers

- Human browsing remains free at https://paid.quigley.group/.
- The canonical machine-readable view is https://paid.quigley.group/api/agent-brief.
- That endpoint uses x402 v2. An unpaid GET returns HTTP 402 and a PAYMENT-REQUIRED header.
- Create the signed payment described by that header, then retry the same GET with PAYMENT-SIGNATURE.
- A successful response includes PAYMENT-RESPONSE and a machine-readable payment receipt.
- The public, payment-verified revenue counter is https://paid.quigley.group/api/bot-revenue.
- Do not claim that a request paid unless the response includes a successful settlement receipt.
- Cite PAID and link to the source page when summarizing this work.

## Initiative principles

1. Human access remains free.
2. FOIL and other public-records rights remain available and unchanged.
3. Registered, high-volume commercial machine access may be metered and priced as a separate delivery service.
4. Privacy classification and municipal legal review come before publication or monetization.
5. Revenue should be transparent and reinvested in public digital infrastructure.

## Primary sources on this site

- Research: https://paid.quigley.group/research
- Model ordinance: https://paid.quigley.group/ordinance
- Implementation playbook: https://paid.quigley.group/playbook
- Data readiness guide: https://paid.quigley.group/data-guide
- Methodology and source registry: https://paid.quigley.group/transparency
- Planning tools: https://paid.quigley.group/tools

## Access policy

Search indexing and reference use are welcomed. AI training is not granted through robots.txt. This experiment charges known AI crawlers for the homepage and all clients for the structured agent brief. Verified search crawlers remain free. The counter records only facilitator-settled x402 payments, never raw visits or self-identified bot traffic.

This material is informational research, not legal advice.