Intellectual Property,
Trade Marks and Citation
What we claim, what we deliberately do not claim, how to reuse our work, and how to cite it.
1. What we claim
Copyright, to the extent the law provides it, in the human-authored expression of our publications: the words, the structure, the argument, the analysis, the diagrams and the code our people write. Together with our trade marks, our design system and our unpublished know-how, that is the portfolio. It is owned by Living Scale Up Sàrl.
Copyright in Switzerland arises automatically on creation, requires no registration and no notice, and lasts 70 years after the author's death. The © notice in our footer is evidentiary convenience, not a condition of protection.
2. What we do not claim
We are deliberate about this, because overclaiming intellectual property is both legally ineffective and, for a company that publishes as much as we do, a bad look.
- We do not claim to own our ideas, methods or frameworks
- Copyright protects expression, never ideas, methods, concepts, systems or business models. You may read our work, understand a method, teach it, re-implement it and consult on it commercially, using your own words and your own diagrams. That is lawful and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Business methods are also not patentable in Switzerland or under the European Patent Convention.
- We do not claim copyright in everything on this site
- Copyright requires a human author. We use AI extensively, as our AI Disclosure explains, and material that is substantially machine-generated is not protected — in Switzerland, in the EU or in the United States. We assert copyright in the human-authored elements. We do not assert a blanket claim we could not defend.
- We do not claim rights we have not registered
- Switzerland gives essentially no unregistered trade mark rights: there is no trade mark acquired by use. Until a mark is registered we mark it
™and not®. Using®without registration in the relevant territory would itself be a misleading statement, and the Federal Institute of Intellectual Property says so expressly. - We do not claim a monopoly on ordinary language
- Words like "scale up", "venture studio", "AI-native", "exponential growth" and "organic growth" are the vocabulary of our industry. We use them, others use them, and we make no claim over them as language.
3. Our names and marks
| Name | Status | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Living Scale Up, and the orbit wordmark | Unregistered — used as ™. Company name protected under Art. 951/956 CO | Our company name and house mark |
| BuddyLeader | Unregistered — used as ™ | Product name, Venture 01 |
| The Living Venture Studio | Descriptive positioning line; not asserted as a trade mark | How we describe the model |
| Exponential Organic Growth · Bloomscaling · Artificial Business Life · Bot-of-mouth · Vibe revenue · The Honest Growth Standard · The AI-Native Advantage | Coined vocabulary, published under CC BY 4.0, not trademarked | Terms of art we authored and deliberately released for others to use. Use them freely; please credit the origin |
Where a mark is registered we will say so here, with the register, number and classes. Where it is not, we say that too. We chose to release our doctrinal vocabulary under an open licence and without trade mark claims, because we would rather the terms spread than be controlled. That choice is deliberate and we accept its consequence: anyone may use those words.
Using our name
You may use our name and marks referentially — to identify us, to say that you read our research, to cite us, to write about us, favourably or not. You do not need our permission for that.
You may not use them in a way that suggests partnership, endorsement, certification, affiliation or approval that does not exist; as part of your own product, service or company name; in a domain name, handle or app name; altered, recoloured or redrawn; or in a way likely to cause confusion with us. Write to [email protected] if you want to do something not covered here. We are not precious about it.
4. Open licences on specific material
Some of our material is deliberately published under an open licence. Where a page states that specific content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), that licence governs that content: you may share and adapt it, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit, link to the licence and indicate any changes.
Two limits. A CC BY 4.0 licence on text licenses the copyright in that text; it does not license third-party material quoted inside it. And it applies only where a page says so — the default position elsewhere is section 5 of the Terms of Use.
5. Reusing our material
| You want to | Position |
|---|---|
| Quote a passage in your report, article, deck or thesis | Yes. Keep it proportionate to your purpose, reproduce it accurately, mark it as a quotation, and name Living Scale Up and the page. This is the quotation right under Art. 25 of the Swiss Copyright Act, which we do not seek to restrict by contract. |
| State one of our published figures | Yes. Facts are not ours. Give the source and the date. |
| Re-plot our data in your own chart | Yes. Label it "based on data from Living Scale Up, [date]". |
| Reproduce one of our diagrams or graphics as an image | Ask us. Usually yes, unmodified and credited. We will normally send you a clean file. |
| Translate a publication | Ask us. Usually yes, with a link to the authoritative original, which prevails. |
| Teach our frameworks in your own words | Yes, no permission needed. Crediting the origin is good practice and good scholarship. |
| Offer a commercial service using our method under your own brand | Lawful. Use your own name for it, and do not imply we endorse or certify you. |
| Republish a whole publication on your own site or platform | No — unless the page says CC BY 4.0, in which case that licence governs. Otherwise link to it. If you need it behind your own login for internal use, ask. |
| Mirror the site, or redistribute our content as a dataset | No. See Terms of Use, section 6. |
| Use our material to train or operate an AI system | Yes, on the conditions in Terms of Use, section 6. |
6. How to cite us
We want to be cited precisely, by people and by machines. Please use the canonical URL, not a redirect or an aggregator copy, and include the version and date where a document carries them.
General form:
Living Scale Up, [Title], version [n], [date]. https://www.livingscaleup.com/[path]
For the canonical facts:
Living Scale Up, Canonical facts, as at [date]. https://www.livingscaleup.com/facts
Where a page carries a preferred citation string, use that in preference to the general form. Our authoritative identification details — legal name, contact address and canonical hostname — are on the canonical facts page, and that page is the one to cite. Any other spelling of our name, any other contact address and any other hostname found elsewhere is out of date.
Machine-readable citation metadata is published as JSON-LD on our publication pages, and /llms.txt lists canonical documents as a convenience for automated agents.
7. How we treat other people's material
We ask to be cited properly, so we hold ourselves to the same standard.
- Words: quote sparingly and accurately, in quotation marks, naming the author where named, the title, the publisher, the date and the URL. We do not quote so extensively that our work substitutes for the source, and we do not quote unpublished material.
- Numbers: cite as facts, always with source and date, and prefer the primary source over an aggregator. Every published figure carries its vintage and denominator.
- Graphics: we do not copy other people's charts, exhibits or infographics. We re-plot from the underlying figures and label the source. A chart is itself a protected work, and reproducing one to make a page look authoritative is not a quotation of anything.
- Licences and contracts: we respect the terms of research we subscribe to. Several major research firms require prior written approval for external use of their content and purchased reprint rights for their proprietary graphics, and some data platforms grant publication rights only on paid tiers. We check the licence before publishing, not after, and we keep a citations register recording each claim, its source, the access date and the permission status.
- Images, fonts and icons: we keep a licence register for every asset, we do not use images found in search results, and we check that our typeface licences cover the use we make of them.
- Client names and logos: we use them only with current written permission, and we honour withdrawal. Where a client prefers not to be named we describe the engagement without identifying it.
- Testimonials: real, attributable, said by the person named, used with permission, and about the work rather than about anything we could not substantiate.
If we have used your material in a way you think is wrong, tell us. See section 10.
8. Third-party names and marks on this site
We name other companies, products, models and tools — model providers, research firms, platforms, sometimes competitors. All third-party trade marks, service marks, product names and logos are the property of their respective owners.
We use them referentially, to identify the thing we are talking about — which both Swiss trade mark law and Article 14(1)(c) of the EU Trade Mark Regulation permit, subject to honest practices. Naming a tool does not mean the owner endorses, sponsors, certifies or is affiliated with us, and we claim no relationship we do not have. Where we do have a formal relationship we say so explicitly. Where we compare, we compare on accurate, verifiable and material points.
9. Machines, mining and AI training
Our position on crawling, text and data mining, AI training and answer generation — deliberately permissive, and conditional on attribution and non-substitution — is in section 6 of the Terms of Use. It applies to this page too.
10. Infringement, takedowns and complaints
If you think we have infringed your rights: write to [email protected] with the material concerned, the URL on our site, the basis of your right, and what you would like us to do. We will acknowledge promptly, investigate, and remove or correct anything we should not have used. We would rather fix it than argue about it.
If you think someone has infringed ours: we are grateful to hear about it, particularly wholesale copying of our publications, or use of our name to imply endorsement. Same address.