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 SER v0.1 canonicalisation rules and their frozen golden vectors — the conformance test. The vectors are byte-identical across Verdict's independent TypeScript and Rust implementations and have been reproduced by a third party on an unrelated machine. Any sealed record can be re-verified end to end with ordinary tooling and no call to Verdict; see /verify.
• ◈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.

Correction — patent boundary, v3

Published August 27, 2026 · Supersedes the v2 boundary statement

An earlier statement of this boundary reserved "any patent-pending construction" while at the same time inviting independent implementation of the specification. Those two things cannot both be true. The reservation as written would have swallowed the invitation. This section replaces it.

• ◈Granted, permanently, at every layer. Everything required to produce, read, verify, or independently reimplement a conformant Sealed Evidence Record is granted — irrevocably, royalty-free, to every conformant implementation, across all Verdict patent claims present and future. That expressly includes the commitment construction, the canonicalisation rules, and every verification operation: reading a record, checking it, confirming a derivation, translating it into another schema, and presenting it to a third party.
• ◈Automatic extension. If any Verdict claim is ever required in order to achieve conformance, that claim is added to the grant automatically on the date conformance requires it, with no further act by Verdict and no request by the implementer.
• ◈Reserved — issuance only. Verdict reserves claims directed solely to the issuance side: generating authority records and minting execution credentials. Nothing on the verification side is reserved.
• ◈Why the reservation cannot grow.The two rules above cage it. A reserved claim can never become necessary for conformance, because the moment it were necessary it would already be granted. So the answer to "does VERDICT-004-PROV reach conformance?" is no, by construction — not by promise. An assessor defining field coverage can do so without asking Verdict's permission, and without Verdict being able to move the boundary underneath them afterwards.

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; VERDICT-002-PROV 64/059,263 and VERDICT-003-PROV 64/059,307 filed May 6, 2026; VERDICT-004-PROV 64/135,051 filed Aug 17, 2026 — is summarized at /patents. None of the four has been examined, allowed, or granted. 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.