An independent maintainer today, openly licensed so adoption can grow without gatekeeping — with a deliberate path to a consortium as implementers arrive.
The protocol is maintained by a single independent maintainer and published under open licenses so adoption can grow without gatekeeping. This is a deliberate posture, not a placeholder. An independent, openly licensed specification with clear authorship and a dated publication record is neutral prior art: it closes an operational gap, references existing standards with respect, and advances no single vendor's schema. That is the posture that earns cooperative engagement from standards bodies.
For v0.1, the maintainer is the ratifier. Decisions fall into three records: Ratified Decisions (settled defaults for v0.1), Open Questions for Consortium (decisions that materially benefit from multi-stakeholder input — for v0.1 ratified with recommended defaults and explicitly reopenable when a governance body forms), and Deferred to v1.x (features deliberately out of v0.1 scope).
As implementers adopt the protocol, governance is intended to broaden into a consortium of founding members — preferably anchored by corporate IP stakeholders rather than service providers, for credibility and neutrality. When that body forms, the Open Questions are reopened for consortium ratification ahead of v1.0; a designated WIPO-liaison role (initially held by the maintainer) is intended to rotate to a corporate member; and a lightweight, opt-in registry for custom namespaced extensions may be convened.
The protocol versions on an adapted SemVer model. Every message carries a protocolVersion, and receivers degrade gracefully across versions — unknown fields are tolerated, not rejected. Schema identities are version-pinned URNs, so a given $id always means the same shape. Releases are immutable git tags and GitHub Releases; the rule is deprecate, don't delete, so published identifiers and URLs keep resolving.
The written specification is licensed for free use with attribution.
The JSON Schemas, validator, types, and reference implementation carry a permissive software licence with an explicit patent grant.
The split is intentional: the prose is shared as documentation; the machine-readable artifacts are shared as software others can build on without friction.
Implementation feedback, issues, and proposals are welcome via the repository. Substantive protocol changes are evaluated against the single scoping principle: the protocol standardizes the patent-operations data layer and nothing else. The maintainer intends to coordinate with WIPO working groups where alignment opportunities arise, particularly around ST.27 evolution and any future WIPO work on the operational layer.