Patent non-assertion covenant

Painted Wolf LLC irrevocably covenants that it will not assert, and will not authorise any party to assert on its behalf, any patent claim it owns or controls, now or in the future, against any party for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing, or distributing an implementation of the Open Agent Rules specification, to the extent the claim is necessarily infringed by implementing the specification — including its document model, evaluation semantics, condition language, capability profiles, conformance fixtures, and schemas.

This covenant:

• Runs with the specification. It binds Painted Wolf LLC and its successors and assigns. A transfer of the relevant patents, or of the specification itself, does not extinguish it.
• Requires nothing of you. No registration, no notification, no fee, no agreement to any other terms. It benefits every implementer automatically.
• Covers every version. It applies to each published version of the specification and to every draft this repository has carried.
• Terminates only defensively. The covenant ceases to benefit any party that files or maintains a patent-infringement claim alleging that an implementation of this specification infringes a patent — and it ceases only as to that party, only for the duration of that claim.

The Apache-2.0 licence covering the schemas, conformance corpus, examples, and code carries its own patent grant (section 3 of that licence); this covenant extends the same royalty-free posture to the specification prose, whose CC BY 4.0 licence does not address patents.

This is a unilateral promise, not a contract offer, and it is intended to be relied upon. The sentence it replaces — "no patent claim is asserted against a conforming implementation" — stated a fact about the present; this covenant binds the future.

Rendered from PATENTS.md.