IP Policy.
Standard stays open.

Verdict commits to a RAND-Z (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory, Zero-royalty) patent licensing posture for the Sealed Evidence Record specification. The commitment is scoped to conformant SER implementations, version-pinned to a published conformance test, and subject to defensive-termination terms.

Interim commitment (effective today)

Pending publication of the full policy text, Verdict Systems Inc. makes the following interim commitment to any party implementing the Sealed Evidence Record (SER) v0.1 specification as published at verdict.systems/patents:

• ◈Scope: the commitment applies to patent claims essential to implementing the published SER v0.1 schema (ser.v0.1.legal_ai_output) and the documented MCP tool contracts. It does not extend to claims outside the SER specification.
• ◈Conformance:a "conformant SER implementation" is one that produces records validating against the published conformance test (publishing alongside the full policy within 14 days).
• ◈Royalty-free, non-discriminatory: for the scope above, Verdict will not assert essential SER patent claims against conformant implementations or their downstream users, and will offer license terms on the same basis to any party.
• ◈Defensive-termination: the commitment terminates as to any party that asserts a patent against Verdict, any SER implementer, or against the SER specification itself.
• ◈Version-pinned: this interim commitment binds to SER v0.1 as published at the time of this page. Future spec revisions will carry a corresponding policy revision.

Precedent

The full policy text models on the W3C Patent Policy — twenty-plus years of edge cases baked into a working open-standards licensing regime. The aim is parity with how core internet standards (TLS, HTTP, JSON Schema) keep their substrate open against capture or fork.

Verdict's underlying patent portfolio (VERDICT-001-NP non-provisional 19/657,024 filed Apr 24, 2026; two provisionals filed May 6, 2026) is summarized at /patents. The patents exist to prevent capture of the SER category by a closed proprietary fork — not to extract rent from adopters.

Partnership inquiries

For partnership or licensing inquiries in advance of the full policy text, contact partnerships@verdict.systems.