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; Paris Convention international priority locked through 20/03/2027).
- 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.
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 & Conformance Shield
Statutory liability defense shield for standard maintenance and ecosystem verification.
ZTDS.ai is an open technical consortium and standard-setting organization, NOT a commercial data processing service or compliance auditor. The specification, test harnesses, 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, OR FREEDOM FROM INFRINGEMENT.
In no event shall ZTDS AI Consortium, its founder Ilya Sibiryakov, member companies, or Fellows be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including data loss, security breaches, or regulatory penalties under GDPR, HIPAA, or EU AI Act) arising in any way out of the use or implementation of the ZTDS standard.
04. Official Trust Marks & Vector Assets
Download verified SVG vector badges and trust marks for compliant implementations.
