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ZKS Patent Policy

The ZKS Working Group operates under a Royalty-Free (RF) mode to encourage widespread adoption, implementation, and verification of the Zero-Knowledge Sovereignty Standard.

1. Goal​

The goal of this policy is to ensure that the ZKS Specification can be implemented by any party - commercial, academic, or open-source - without the requirement to pay royalties or execute separate license agreements for "Essential Claims."

2. Definitions​

"Contributor" means any person or organization that (a) submits, proposes, or co-authors text that is incorporated into the ZKS Specification (including via the RFC process or pull requests to the specification repository), or (b) formally enrolls as a participant in the ZKS Working Group. The licensing commitment in Section 3 binds a Contributor from the moment of contribution or enrollment and survives later withdrawal with respect to Specification text existing at the time of withdrawal.

"Essential Claims" are those patent claims, owned or controlled by a Contributor, that are necessarily infringed by an implementation of the normative portions of the ZKS Specification. Essential Claims do not extend to other proprietary features or codebases, nor to claims that would be infringed only by optional, non-normative implementation choices.

"Implementer" means any party that makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, or distributes an implementation of the ZKS Specification.

3. Licensing Commitment​

Each Contributor agrees to grant to any Implementer a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, non-revocable license (subject only to Section 6) to the Contributor's Essential Claims, solely for implementation of the Standard.

4. Disclosure Obligation​

A Contributor who has actual knowledge of a patent or published patent application, held by the Contributor or by a third party, that the Contributor believes contains Essential Claims MUST disclose it to the Working Group within 90 days of the earlier of (a) making the relevant contribution or (b) becoming aware of the claim's essentiality. Disclosures are published alongside the Specification. Disclosure is not an admission of essentiality or validity. Third parties who are not Contributors are invited (but not obliged) to disclose potentially essential claims to zks.working.group [at] zks-standard.org.

5. Exclusion Procedure​

A new Contributor may exclude specifically identified Essential Claims from the Section 3 commitment only by written notice to the Working Group within 60 days of their first contribution, identifying the patent or application and the affected Specification text. Excluded claims are published with the disclosure record. The Working Group will consider redesigning the affected normative text to avoid excluded claims. No exclusions may be filed against Specification text that the Contributor authored or co-authored.

6. Reciprocity (Defensive Suspension)​

The patent license granted above allows for a "Defensive Suspension." If an Implementer initiates patent litigation against a Contributor claiming that the ZKS Specification infringes their patent, the royalty-free license granted to that Implementer may be suspended or terminated.

The text of the ZKS Specification itself is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the text, provided appropriate credit is given.

8. Relationship to Other Patent Policies​

If the ZKS Specification is contributed to a formal standards development organization (e.g., ITU-T, ISO/IEC), the patent policy of that organization (such as the common ITU-T/ITU-R/ISO/IEC patent policy and its declaration process) will additionally apply to the resulting deliverable. The commitments in this policy are independent of, and are not diminished by, any such process.

This policy is intended to align with the W3C Patent Policy and the principles of Open Standards. For specific legal inquiries, please contact the Working Group.