Legal & Trademark FAQ

The following are trademarks of the KYE Protocol™ project: KYE™, KYE Protocol™, Know Your Entity™, Authority Finality™, Authority Graph™, Decision Map™, Evidence Graph™, Blast Radius Map™, Compliance Map™, KYE Compliance Mapping Rail™, KYE Cloud™, KYE Conformant™, KYE Certified™, KYE Self-Tested™, and KYE Self-Attested™.

No. You may not use “KYE™” or any of the protected marks in your product’s name, domain, organisation name or logo. You may describe your product as “KYE Protocol™-compatible” or “conformant with KYE Protocol™ v1.0” once you pass the public conformance fixture pack.

Use the ™ symbol on the first prominent use in any public document or page. Subsequent uses on the same page may drop it. In code comments, READMEs and developer chat the symbol is optional but encouraged.

Yes — nominative fair use is fine. You can write factual comparisons (“Vendor X vs. KYE Protocol™”) provided you don’t imply endorsement, sponsorship or affiliation, and you don’t use the logo as if it were yours.

No. KYE Certified™ is reserved for the formal certification programme published by the project. Vendors may self-declare conformance levels (Self-Tested™ / Self-Attested™) per the conformance & certification spec, but the L4 Certified™ badge is issued only by the project.

Apache License, Version 2.0. That covers the vocabulary, ID format, JSON Schemas, OpenAPI specifications, examples, reference Gateway source, SDKs, conformance fixtures, this site, and the whitepaper — unless an individual file specifies otherwise.

Yes. Forks and derivative works are permitted under the Apache 2.0 terms. You must not, however, use the protected marks to identify a forked or derivative project that is not the published protocol.

No. Contributions follow the inbound-equals-outbound principle: by submitting a pull request you agree to license your contribution under Apache 2.0.

Free (Apache 2.0): the protocol itself — vocabulary, schemas, dictionaries, OpenAPI, profile bindings, the three reference SDKs (TypeScript / Python / Go), the local validator, the conformance test pack, local decision helpers, the reference Gateway. You can build a real KYE-conformant integration end-to-end with no payment and no signature beyond the licence.

Paid (KYE Cloud™): the operational trust layer — hosted registry, managed validator API, enterprise dashboards (Decision Map™ / Authority Graph™ UIs), graph analytics, evidence-pack generation, recovery console, KYE™ Self-Audit™ Cloud, the KYE Conformant™ / KYE Certified™ certification registry, regulated-sector compliance packs (EU AI Act, ISO 42001, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, PSD3, DORA, NIS2), managed webhooks, SLA-backed support, BYOC / on-prem installer.

Rule of thumb: open-source the protocol-adoption layer, monetise the operational trust layer. The open SDKs are not a crippled trial — the paid product wins because it is operationally better, not because the open layer is starved. To talk pricing, use the Speak to sales option in the Talk to us modal.

Specific mechanism designs — decision evaluation, hash-chain construction, cascade ordering, attenuation propagation, signal-driven invalidation — sit in a separate patent track and are intentional placeholders pre-filing in the development repo. Once filed they will be made available royalty-free for any conformant implementation.

EU and UK patent law requires absolute novelty. Disclosing the mechanism designs publicly before filing destroys novelty in those jurisdictions. The placeholder convention preserves novelty without holding back the public protocol surface.

The publicly published vocabulary, URN format, schemas and OpenAPI are released under the Apache 2.0 patent grant; that covers conformant implementation of the public surface. If you need written assurance about the patent track, open a discussion at KYE-Protocol/Discussions or email [email protected].

Five tiers in the KYE™ Conformance & Certification Programme™: L0 Declared, L1 KYE Self-Tested™, L2 KYE Self-Attested™, L3 KYE Conformant™ (with optional Profile / Compliance variants), and L4 KYE Certified™. See the whitepaper.

Clone the public examples repository and run npm test (or the language-specific equivalent) inside it. The pack ships 26 conformance fixtures and 149 unit / integration tests. Submit your run output to the public registry to claim Self-Tested™.

Yes. Both Self-Attested™ and Certified™ badges are renewed annually against the then-current spec version. The signed certification record records the spec version, the run hash and the renewal cadence.

The full text is in the terms & conditions on the legal page. In short: lawful use of the site and the protocol; no impersonation or false-conformance claims; the protocol is provided “as is” with no warranty (Apache 2.0 §7–9 govern); English & Welsh law applies.

The modal requires you to accept the terms & conditions and the privacy policy before sending. The form opens your local mail client with a pre-filled message to [email protected] — nothing leaves your device until you press Send.

No. There are no third-party analytics, no advertising trackers, no behavioural cookies, no fingerprinting scripts. The full privacy policy is on the legal page.

Three keys in your browser’s localStorage: kye-theme (light/dark), kye-audience (audience filter), and kye-sec-* (which sections you’ve opened). All client-side; never sent to a server.

Your browser composes a mailto: link with the fields you typed. Your mail client sends the email when you press Send. Once it arrives at [email protected], the maintainers process it under legitimate interest to handle your enquiry. Messages are retained only as long as needed and never shared with third parties except where required by law.

Yes. Email [email protected] with the subject “Data request”. We respond within 30 days. UK GDPR / EU GDPR / CCPA-equivalent rights apply where you live.

For trademark questions, security advisories, patent-licensing requests, or anything that doesn’t belong in a public discussion, email [email protected], or use the Talk to us button in the footer of any page.

Bug reports and RFC discussion happen in the public forum: KYE-Protocol/Discussions. Security vulnerabilities should be reported privately per SECURITY.md.