OSARA Intellectual Property Rights Policy¶

Open Source United Communities of Practice — Standards IPR Policy, v1.0 Effective: March 2026 Applies to: the OSARA Specification, the AI Bill of Rights, and all companion documents in the OSARA Standards Family.

1. Purpose¶

This policy establishes the rules under which contributors offer technical and editorial input to the OSARA Standards Family, and the rights that adopters and implementers may rely on when implementing the published specifications. It is modelled on the principles of the W3C Patent Policy and the OpenWeb Foundation Agreements (OWFa 1.0), adapted for the multi-stakeholder governance structure of Open Source United.

The intent is unambiguous: adopting and implementing OSARA must be possible without obtaining a patent licence from any contributor, on a royalty-free basis, for the lifetime of the specification.

2. Definitions¶

Term	Meaning
Contributor	Any person or legal entity that submits a contribution (text, requirement, code, comment) to any document in the OSARA Standards Family through the public RFC process, pull request, issue, or working-group session.
Contribution	Any material submitted for inclusion in an OSARA document, including specification text, requirement IDs, examples, diagrams, and conformance criteria.
Essential Claim	A patent claim that is necessarily infringed by an implementation that complies with the normative requirements of a published OSARA document.
Compliant Implementation	An implementation that fully satisfies the normative requirements of a published OSARA document at its declared conformance class.
Document	Any of: the OSARA Specification (`specs/osara/`), the AI Bill of Rights (`specs/ai-bill-of-rights/`), the OSARA Overview & Concepts (`specs/osara-overview/`), the OSARA Threat Model (`specs/osara-threat-model/`), the OSARA Privacy Considerations (`specs/osara-privacy/`), and successor documents adopted under this policy.

3. Copyright in Contributions¶

Contributors retain copyright in their contributions. By submitting a contribution, the contributor grants to Open Source United and to all third parties a perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to:

reproduce, modify, distribute, and publish the contribution as part of any OSARA document;
authorise others to do the same, including in derivative national or regional implementations;
publish the contribution under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0), the licence under which all OSARA documents are published.

Contributors who require any other treatment of copyright must declare it at the time of contribution. Such contributions may not be accepted if their licence terms are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 publication of the OSARA documents.

4. Patent Non-Assertion Commitment¶

By submitting a contribution, each contributor irrevocably commits — on its own behalf and on behalf of all its affiliates — that:

It will not assert any Essential Claim that it owns or controls, now or in the future, against any party making, using, importing, offering for sale, or selling a Compliant Implementation.
The commitment runs with the patent. If the contributor transfers any patent containing an Essential Claim, the commitment binds the transferee. Contributors must include this binding obligation in any patent transfer or licence affecting an Essential Claim.
The commitment is royalty-free and worldwide.
The commitment is irrevocable for as long as the OSARA document containing the contribution is published and not formally withdrawn.

The commitment does not require contributors to grant licences to non-Essential Claims, nor to claims that are not infringed by a Compliant Implementation.

5. Defensive Suspension¶

A party that initiates patent litigation alleging infringement of any of its patents by an OSARA-compliant implementation forfeits the benefit of the patent non-assertion commitment in §4 with respect to that party for the duration of the litigation. This is to discourage strategic litigation against the open standard and is consistent with the defensive-suspension provisions of the Apache 2.0 licence.

6. Disclosure of Known Essential Claims¶

Contributors are required to disclose, at the time of contribution, any Essential Claim they are aware of that is owned or controlled by them or by any of their affiliates. Disclosure is made on the relevant RFC or pull request. Open Source United maintains a public register of disclosed Essential Claims associated with each published document.

Failure to disclose a known Essential Claim does not invalidate the patent non-assertion commitment in §4, which binds the contributor regardless of disclosure.

7. Trademarks¶

The names "OSARA", "AI Bill of Rights" (as used in the OSARA Standards Family context), "Open Source United", "OSARA-Certified", "OSARA-C", "OSARA-A", and "OSARA-S" are trademarks of Open Source United. A separate OSARA Trademark Policy governing certification marks, brand usage, and visual identity is published at v1.0 of the standard. The trademark policy operates independently of this IPR policy.

8. National and Regional Adaptation¶

Open Source United encourages national and regional regulatory authorities to adopt the OSARA Standards Family in national implementations. Adaptation is permitted under CC BY 4.0 attribution. Adopters may not represent national adaptations as identical to the canonical OSU-published version unless the adaptation is normatively equivalent.

The patent non-assertion commitment in §4 extends to implementations conforming to OSU-published canonical versions. National adaptations that introduce additional normative requirements may carry their own IPR provisions, but those additional provisions must not weaken the rights established here.

9. Specification Withdrawal and Survival¶

If Open Source United formally withdraws an OSARA document, the patent non-assertion commitment continues to apply to all Compliant Implementations made before the withdrawal date, in perpetuity. The CC BY 4.0 licence on the document text also survives withdrawal.

10. Governing Law¶

This policy is administered by Open Source United and interpreted under the principles applicable to UN Communities of Practice. Disputes arising from interpretation of this policy are referred first to the OSARA Steering Committee and, on appeal, to the relevant competent authority in the contributor's jurisdiction.

Acceptance¶

Submission of a contribution to any OSARA document constitutes acceptance of this policy by the contributor and by any legal entity on whose behalf the contributor acts. Where required by the contributor's organization, a formal IPR Acceptance Form is available from Open Source United and may be filed in addition to per-contribution acceptance.

Revision History¶

Version	Date	Notes
1.0	March 2026	Initial publication alongside OSARA v0.4 and AI Bill of Rights v1.1