Chapter 6 – Intellectual Property & Confidentiality

Article 23 | Intellectual Property Rights for Outputs

(1) Background Intellectual Property: Alliance Members, participating developers, and partnering institutions retain exclusive title and ownership over all pre-existing intellectual property, background trade secrets, proprietary datasets, and pre-existing codebases brought into OpenBharat.net projects, working groups, or testbed tracks.

(2) Governance and Stewardship of Collaborative Deliverables:

• Title Stewardship and Legal Personhood: In accordance with Article 6 of this Charter and the parent framework of the Indian Society of Artificial Intelligence and Law (ISAIL), all title, copyright, and canonical custodianship in collective standards specifications, normative instruments, technical benchmarks, and project documentation generated under OpenBharat.net Working Groups (OWGs) shall vest in ISAIL as the institutional steward for the public benefit.

• Open Standardisation Deliverables: Finalized technical specifications, architectures, guidelines, and compliance frameworks shall be published under open-access terms (such as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International or equivalent permissive public licenses), ensuring royalty-free implementation, reference, and deployment across the ecosystem.

• Code, Models, and Computational Deliverables: All software libraries, reference implementations, neural weights, and developer tooling produced by OWGs shall be released under standard open-source licenses (permissive licenses such as Apache 2.0 or MIT, copyleft licenses such as GNU LGPL/GPLv3, or specialized open-weight frameworks including OpenRAIL) as determined in the track charter pursuant to Article 6.

• Inbound Contribution Licensing: By submitting pull requests, benchmark data, or text contributions, each participating member grants ISAIL and the OpenBharat.net community an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to incorporate, modify, publish, and sublicense such contributions under the designated project license.

• Patent Commitments and Non-Assertion: Contributing entities retain title to their pre-existing patent claims but agree to grant implementers of ratified OpenBharat.net standards a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual patent license to make, use, sell, and distribute implementations strictly necessary to comply with the normative sections of the specification.

(3) Trade Secrets and Confidential Disclosures:

• Technical deliberations, bug reports, and working sprints are presumed open public commons unless explicitly designated under the Restricted Executive classification pursuant to Article 9.

• Where proprietary infrastructure telemetry, unannounced vulnerability reports, or confidential benchmarks are disclosed during working sessions, the disclosing party must clearly mark materials as confidential. All participating OWG members shall maintain non-disclosure obligations for a period of two (2) years from disclosure.

(4) Survey-Based Evidence and Empirical Research Regimes: Notwithstanding paragraph (2), the following proprietary and attribution terms apply to empirical survey-based evidence collection and market research conducted under Schedule 3 of this Charter:

• Sole Institutional Ownership: All survey questionnaires, raw response datasets, analytical models, and methodological frameworks derived from evidence-gathering activities shall vest exclusively and entirely in ISAIL, whether conducted directly or jointly with an accredited Knowledge Partner.

• Partner Attribution Rights: An accredited Knowledge Partner executing or supporting field surveys shall hold an irrevocable right of institutional attribution in resultant whitepapers, acknowledging its role as an official survey execution partner. ISAIL may, by formal written memo, confer co-attribution standing, which shall not convey any property, editorial veto, distribution, or derivative rights.

• Permitted Non-Commercial Use: Knowledge Partners retain a limited, non-exclusive license to use published survey findings solely for their own internal non-commercial research, academic study, and marketing attribution. Knowledge Partners hold no right to alter, modify, re-license, re-weight, or release unauthorized derivative cuts of published survey datasets.

• Background Survey Expertise: Nothing in this paragraph diminishes or transfers pre-existing survey methodologies, psychometric tools, or proprietary testing frameworks owned by a Knowledge Partner prior to undertaking joint field collection.