Standards, Patent Policy & Terms
Open specification licensing under Creative Commons, irrevocable zero-royalty patent non-assertion covenants, and cryptographic trust mark governance under RFC-8821.
01. Tri-Partite Legal Architecture
Our governance strictly separates the public specification text, open-source reference implementations, and verified certification trust marks.
Specification Text
The formal text of the ZTDS specification, RFC documents, and mathematical proofs are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0).
- Free to read, copy, translate, and implement globally.
- Mandatory academic citation to ZTDS Consortium and author DOIs.
- Immutable version archival on Zenodo, OSF, and CERN.
Reference Engine & SDK
Official test suites, verification CLIs, and reference SDK engines are dual-licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
- Commercial and enterprise use permitted without royalty.
- Express grant of patent rights from all consortium contributors.
- Patent retaliation termination protection built in.
Trust Mark Governance
The designations "ZTDS", "Zero-Trust Data Sanitization", and the ZTDS Verified™ seal are protected certification trade marks (ILPO Classes 9 & 42, Order #182655957; WIPO Madrid System & Paris Convention international protection).
- Display permitted ONLY for products with active cryptographic registry receipts.
- Revocable if an implementation violates Invariant 1 (Zero-Egress).
- No recoloring, distortion, or unauthorized co-branding permitted.
02. RAND-Z Patent Non-Assertion Covenant
The ZTDS AI Consortium enforces a Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory with Zero Royalty (RAND-Z) patent covenant modeled after the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Patent Policy. Core computational architecture, volatile memory isolation, and deterministic reversible tokenization methods are covered by U.S. & International Patents Pending (Paris Convention & 35 U.S.C. § 119 Priority).
Irrevocable Covenant Terms
"Each Participant, Fellow, and Corporate Sponsor irrevocably pledges that it will not assert against any Implementer any Essential Claims owned or controlled by the Participant, for the making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing of any compliant Implementation of a Ratified ZTDS Specification, provided that such Implementation complies with all Normative Requirements set forth in RFC-8821."
03. Disclaimer of Warranty, Negligent Verification Shield & Terms
Statutory liability defense shield for specification authorship, ecosystem verification, and Conformity Assessment Body (CAB) operations.
3.1. Express AS-IS Disclaimer of Warranty
ZTDS.ai is an open technical consortium and standard-setting organization, NOT a commercial data processing service, cloud vendor, or compliance auditor. The specification, test harnesses, automated linter suites (npx ztds-audit), and registry listings are provided “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, FREEDOM FROM BUGS, OR FREEDOM FROM INFRINGEMENT (UCC § 2-316).
In no event shall ZTDS AI Consortium, its founder Ilya Sibiryakov, member companies, working group chairs, or Fellows be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including data loss, security breaches, unauthorized disclosures, or regulatory penalties under GDPR, HIPAA, BSA, or EU AI Act) arising in any way out of the use, interpretation, or implementation of the ZTDS standard.
3.2. Negligent Verification Shield
The “ZTDS Verified” designation confirms strictly that a designated software version demonstrated compliance with the four foundational invariants set forth in ZTDS RFC v1.0 under reproducible automated or network inspection tests at the specific point in time recorded in its cryptographic audit hash (audit_hash). Conformance assessment does NOT certify overall application security, backend flawlessness, or immunity from unrelated vulnerabilities (e.g. SQL injection, server compromise, or insider threat).
3.3. Statutory Non-Accreditation Notice
ZTDS.ai functions as an open technical specification maintainer, NOT as a state-licensed forensic laboratory (ISO/IEC 17025), accredited conformity registrar (ISO/IEC 17021/17065), certified public accounting firm, or legal counsel. Conformance testing does not constitute formal legal advice or a statutory compliance determination. Data Controllers remain solely responsible for jurisdiction-specific compliance under applicable data protection laws.
3.4. 24-Hour Emergency Revocation Protocol
In the event that an accredited or registered implementation is verified to transmit unmasked sensitive cleartext across a public network socket prior to local sanitization (Severity Critical violation of Invariant 1), the CAB executes automated certificate revocation within 24 hours, invalidating public badges and recording revocation in the immutable Git ledger.
3.5. Forensic & Investigative Tool Disclaimers
Implementations accredited under the ZTDS-FORENSIC profile provide automated computational data sanitization and cryptographic receipt minting. Investigators, risk officers, and forensic analysts retain sole responsibility for evaluating procedural chain-of-custody rules and verifying that sanitized outputs satisfy the evidentiary standards of their presiding jurisdiction.
3.6. Multi-Vertical Sectoral Non-Reliance Schedule
Specification SSOT →All conformance attestations, badges, and audit tools across healthcare (HIPAA / FDA), financial services (GLBA / SEC / PCI DSS), legal practice (FRE 502 / ABA Rule 1.6), human resources (EEOC / Title VII / NYC LL 144), national defense (ITAR / EAR), incident response (SEC 8-K / GDPR), and AI agent workflows (EU AI Act) are subject to the normative non-reliance provisions set forth in the ZTDS Multi-Vertical Statutory Insulation Specification. Regulated Data Controllers maintain strict, non-delegable responsibility for statutory compliance.
04. Official Trust Marks & Vector Assets
Download verified SVG vector badges and trust marks for compliant implementations.
