Record · The Corporate Estate
What is Jovian Archive?
Jovian Archive is the corporate entity behind the Human Design System — the name attached to the claim to hold its rights, to license its schools, and to publish its books, software, and marks. This page reports what the record shows: the three successive companies that have carried the name, the Singapore entity that holds the rights today, what it holds and what it licenses, and the part it plays in the ownership and trademark story. It keeps the corporate facts apart from the claims made on their basis, and returns no verdict of its own.
This page is documentary. It is not affiliated with Jovian Archive. It sets out primary-record facts — corporate registrations, the trademark file, and a court ruling — and links each so readers can verify it. Where a claim of ownership and a court's finding sit side by side, it records that they do, without collapsing one into the other.
What Jovian Archive is
"Jovian Archive" is the name Ra Uru Hu gave the family corporation he formed at the end of the 1990s to hold and administer the Human Design System. In its current form it is the entity that claims copyright over Ra's teachings, licenses the schools that certify practitioners — the International Human Design School (IHDS) and the BG5 Business Institute — and publishes the system's software, books, and branded marks. It is not itself a school or a certifying body; it is the rights-holding and licensing structure that sits behind them.
The name has not, however, belonged to a single company. The record shows it running through three successive corporate entities across roughly seventeen years and three jurisdictions, and the distinction matters for who holds what today.
Sources in this archive: /record — the corporate record (Section 3), the three successive Jovian Archive entities, and the licensing structure.
The three entities that have carried the name
The record documents at least three successive companies holding the Human Design System's intellectual property, each superseding the last:
- Jovian Archive Corporation — Sedona, Arizona. The original entity, dating to the founding era after Ra's break with his American school. Jovian Archive states its own founding as 1999; the specific Arizona incorporation date has not been independently verified in publicly accessible records.
- Jovian Archive Media Inc. — Ontario, Canada. Incorporated in 2004, with a headquarters address listed in Santa Eulalia, Baleares, Spain — Ra's location on Ibiza. This is the entity the IHDS About page still names as holding "the exclusive copyright to The Human Design System," though, as the record notes, that statement now refers to a superseded company.
- Jovian Archive Media Pte. Ltd. — Singapore. Incorporated November 16, 2016 — five years after Ra Uru Hu's death — and registered as an Exempt Private Limited Company. This is the current intellectual-property holding entity, and it claims copyright over Ra's teachings.
The progression — Arizona in the founding era, Ontario in 2004, Singapore in 2016 — is a sequence of intellectual-property restructuring across three jurisdictions. The two more recent incorporation dates are drawn from public business registries (the Ontario registry and Singapore's ACRA); the archive labels the Arizona date as unverified rather than filling the gap.
Sources in this archive: /record — the Jovian Archive entity chain, the incorporation dates, and the registered addresses (Section 3).
What it holds and what it licenses
What Jovian Archive holds falls into distinct kinds, and the record keeps them apart. It asserts copyright over Ra's teachings — his recorded courses, books, and particular software — and it owns a set of registered U.S. trademarks (two live composite brand marks and the registered mandala design image). On the licensing side, it is named as the single international rights-holder standing behind the IHDS, the BG5 Business Institute, and the licensed national organizations; the schools certify under its license, and system software such as the BG5 MMI tool is sold through it.
One distinction runs through all of this. Owning a specific work — a book, a recording, a logo — is a different thing from owning the underlying system of ideas. The trademarks Jovian Archive holds are marks, not the methodology; the copyrights it asserts attach to particular works, not to the framework a chart is read by. The archive's page on the ownership question sets that distinction out in full.
Sources in this archive: /record/trademark — the marks Jovian Archive holds; /can-human-design-be-owned — the difference between owning a work and owning a system of ideas.
Its role in the trademark story
The U.S. trademark file tells a specific story about how far Jovian Archive's marks reach. The phrase "The Human Design System" has never been successfully registered as a word mark: three applications were filed and all three are dead, the two most recent of them filed under the Singapore entity. What is live is narrower — two composite brand marks, MyBodyGraph Human Design and Jovian Archive Human Design, each registered with an explicit disclaimer of any exclusive right to the words "Human Design" apart from the mark as shown. The mandala design image is registered as a design mark, cancelled once in 2018 for a missed declaration and re-registered the following year.
The gap between what those registrations cover and what they are imagined to cover is the point. A composite mark protects a particular brand lockup; a design registration protects a specific image; neither reaches the words "Human Design" standing alone or the methodology the image depicts — the disclaimers say as much on the register's own face. Every serial, registration number, and status is set out in the archive's trademark record.
Sources in this archive: /record/trademark — the USPTO file: the lapsed word marks, the live composite marks with "Human Design" disclaimed, and the mandala design registration.
Its role in the ownership story
Jovian Archive is the name attached to the claim that the Human Design System is owned. That claim — the Singapore entity's assertion of copyright over Ra's teachings — sits in the record beside a court finding that runs the other way. On June 3, 2020, the Tribunale di Firenze (the Florence Civil Court) ruled in case R.G. 2756/2020 that no copyright subsists over the Human Design System as a set of ideas and methods, and that those ideas and methods are freely discussable. The case arose when the Italian licensee of the rights-holding company sought to enjoin a competing Human Design book; the court declined.
Two documented facts therefore stand side by side, and the archive keeps them there rather than resolving them: the rights-holding company asserts copyright over the teachings, and one court has held that the system as a set of ideas and methods is not copyrightable. The ruling does not place specific works — Ra's books, recordings, and software — into the public domain; those remain protected as the individual works they are. What the court held is that the conceptual framework cannot be exclusively owned. The full order, with docket, judge, and parties, is set out in the archive's primary-document page.
Sources in this archive: /record/florence-ruling — the Tribunale di Firenze order (R.G. 2756/2020); /can-human-design-be-owned — the ownership question in full.
Sources in this archive
- /record — the corporate record: the three Jovian Archive entities, their incorporation dates, and the addresses (Section 3), and the trademark record (Section 1).
- /record/trademark — the USPTO file: the lapsed "Human Design System" word marks, the live composite marks with "Human Design" disclaimed, and the mandala design mark.
- /record/florence-ruling — the Tribunale di Firenze order (R.G. 2756/2020): no copyright over the system as ideas and methods.
- /can-human-design-be-owned — what can and cannot be owned, on the record.
- /zeno — the documentary history of the teachers removed under the ownership posture.
The school Jovian Archive licenses is documented on its own page: what the IHDS is and the certification path it runs. The reason this archive exists at all is downstream of the ownership question: the fullest account of the teachers written out of a system no one exclusively holds is the book ZENO, and the archive's documentary books are collected at the books page.