DRAFT — PENDING COUNSEL. TIER-0 BY CONTENT; THE REPOSITORY STAYS PRIVATE UNTIL COUNSEL CONFIRMS THESE TERMS (founder decision, 2026-09-14).

# Licence — the Seal1618 protocol

Seal1618 is free to verify and free to implement, forever. This file makes that enforceable rather than a promise. It has three parts, and each part names exactly what it covers.

## 1. The specification and its prose — CC BY 4.0

`kit/SPEC.md`, `CHANGELOG.md`, `docs/*`, `README.md`, `AGENTS.md`, `LINEAGE.md`, the `conformance/` and `vectors-draft/` READMEs, and every sample and vector document in `kit/` and `vectors-draft/` are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

You may copy, redistribute, adapt and build on them for any purpose, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit ("the Seal1618 protocol, Stratagem Tools") and indicate if changes were made. A derived specification must not call itself Seal1618 or claim conformance it has not shown (see §4).

## 2. The code — Apache License 2.0

`kit/txra-verify.cjs`, `kit/txra_agenttrail.py`, everything under `conformance/`, `licensee/` and `scripts/`, `brand.mjs`, and every other source file in this repository are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Copyright 2026 Stratagem Tools Pty Ltd (the holding entity; see `strategy-docs/OWNERSHIP_AND_SECRETS.md`). Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use these files except in compliance with the License. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

## 3. Patent non-assertion

To the extent the licensor holds or later obtains any patent claim that would be necessarily infringed by implementing the Seal1618 protocol as specified in any published version of `kit/SPEC.md`, or by verifying a document that conforms to it, the licensor covenants not to assert that claim against any person for such implementation or verification. This covenant is perpetual and irrevocable, except against a party that first asserts a patent claim against a Seal1618 implementation or verifier. It is in addition to, not in place of, the Apache-2.0 patent grant in §2.

## 4. Names

"Seal1618" and "Attest1618" are names of the licensor. This licence grants no right to use them except to state truthfully that an implementation implements, or a document conforms to, a named published version of the protocol. A conformance claim is a claim about the conformance suite's result on that version, and the licensee harness under `licensee/` is a harness, not a certification (`README.md`).

## 5. What this file does not cover

The Attest1618 engine and producing instance are not in this repository and are not licensed by this file; they are proprietary and licensed separately, in writing (the `attest1618` repository's `LICENSE.md`). The copy of the kit served at creation1618.com/verify carries whatever licence file the SPEC version it serves was released with; a version released before this file existed carried none, and the next release (SPEC 1.12.0) carries this one.