Who owns what
Last updated 12 August 2026
BWMN asks people to write down problems and hand them over. That only works if it is clear who owns what afterwards. This page says so in plain terms, before you submit rather than after.
Your Work Statement is yours
A Work Statement is owned by the person who found and articulated the problem. Submitting it to BWMN does not transfer ownership of it, and nothing on this platform asks you to sign it away.
You keep the right to take the same problem elsewhere, work on it yourself, or find your own funder for it. Submitting here is not exclusivity, and BWMN declining to fund something does not trap it.
What BWMN needs in return
To do anything useful with a statement, BWMN needs permission to work on it. By submitting, you grant a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store it, assess it, score it, research it, and — where you have separately consented — publish it.
Non-exclusive is the important word. The licence lets BWMN act; it does not stop you acting, and it does not stop you granting the same permission to somebody else.
Co-funded statements are jointly owned
Where a statement is taken forward with money from more than one party, it is jointly owned by its co-funders in proportion to their contribution, as recorded at the time each contribution is made.
Joint ownership means no single co-funder can sell, license exclusively, or abandon the statement alone. Those decisions need the agreement of the others, and the record of who contributed what is what settles any disagreement.
Research outputs and building blocks
Where BWMN funds research, the outputs of that research — the working papers, validated building blocks and findings — belong to BWMN and its co-funders, not to the original proposer by default. Finding a problem and funding its solution are different contributions, and conflating them would be unfair in both directions.
The originating statement stays yours throughout. What changes hands is what was built on top of it, by the people who did that work.
Being credited is not a role
If you ask to be credited on a published statement, you appear as “contributed by”. That wording is deliberate and narrow.
It means: you found and described this problem. It does not make you a co-creator, a Research Assistant, a Domain Manager, a co-founder or an investor. Every one of those is a distinct role with its own entry requirements, obligations and — where applicable — economic rights, and each is joined deliberately rather than acquired by having contributed.
Credit carries no equity, no revenue share and no claim on research outputs. Nobody should discover that only after seeing their name on something.
What is published, and when
Nothing you submit is published automatically. A statement reaches the public Job Board only after it has been assessed, classified and approved through the gate process, and your name appears on it only if you asked for that separately.
Solutions found by the assistants and published as user suggestions are not BWMN endorsements. Anything BWMN stands behind goes through its own validation first, and is labelled as such.
If you disagree with how something was handled
Use the feedback channel for anything about ownership, attribution or how a statement was treated. For anything you would rather raise without giving your name, the confidential channel asks for no identity at all.