Contributor Licence Agreement

This Contributor Licence Agreement ("Agreement") sets out the terms under which you contribute material to the SIGNET standard and its supporting artifacts, stewarded by Concert Foundation ("Concert"). Its purpose is simple: to let Concert publish your contribution under the open licences described in the IP & Licensing Policy, with the legal certainty that the wider community needs in order to build on it freely — while ensuring that no contributor, and no commercial operator, gains a preferential position over any other.

You do not transfer ownership of your contribution. You retain your copyright and your patents. You grant Concert the licences set out below so the standard can remain open.

Plain-language summary (non-binding). You keep ownership of what you contribute. You give Concert permission to publish it under open licences (CC0, CC BY 4.0, Apache 2.0, or CDLA-Permissive, depending on the artifact). You promise it is your work and that you are allowed to contribute it. You grant a royalty-free patent licence covering the parts of your contribution that an implementer would necessarily infringe by conforming to the standard. You get no special rights, exclusivity, or privileged certification path in return. The full terms below govern.

1. Definitions

1.1 "Contribution" means any original work of authorship — including specifications, data models, process maps, blueprints, source code, test data, documentation, or training material — that you intentionally submit to Concert for inclusion in, or as part of, a SIGNET Artifact.

1.2 "SIGNET Artifact" means any normative or reference artifact stewarded by Concert, as classified in the IP & Licensing Policy.

1.3 "Submit" means any form of communication sent to Concert or its designated repositories, issue trackers, or working groups, intended for inclusion in a SIGNET Artifact, excluding any communication conspicuously marked "Not a Contribution".

1.4 "You" / "Your" means the individual or legal entity agreeing to this Agreement. Where the contributor is an entity, "You" includes affiliates under common control.

1.5 "Essential Claims" means those claims of a patent or patent application that You own or control, which are necessarily infringed by implementing the portion of the SIGNET Artifact created from Your Contribution, where there is no commercially reasonable non-infringing alternative. Essential Claims do not include claims infringed only by an optional feature, an enabling technology, or the combination of the Contribution with other technology.

1.6 "Network Authority" means the governance body of Concert Foundation responsible for the standard, as described on the Governance page.

2. Copyright licence

2.1 You grant to Concert and to recipients of SIGNET Artifacts a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright licence to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contribution and such derivative works.

2.2 You agree that Concert may license Your Contribution to the public under one or more of the open licences specified for that artifact tier in the IP & Licensing Policy — namely CC0 1.0, CC BY 4.0, Apache License 2.0, or CDLA-Permissive 2.0 — and may adopt successor or additional open licences approved by the Network Authority, provided they remain open and non-discriminatory.

2.3 To the extent permitted by law, You waive, and agree not to assert, any moral rights in Your Contribution to the extent necessary for Concert to exercise the licence in §2.1. Where moral rights cannot be waived, You agree not to assert them in a manner that would impede the open use of the SIGNET Artifact.

3. Patent licence

3.1 You grant to Concert and to every recipient and implementer of the SIGNET Artifact a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in §3.2) patent licence under Your Essential Claims to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer implementations of the SIGNET Artifact.

3.2 Defensive termination. If You or Your affiliate institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim) alleging that the SIGNET Artifact, or an implementation conforming to it, infringes a patent, then any patent licences granted to You under this Agreement for that SIGNET Artifact terminate as of the date such litigation is filed. The licences You granted to others under §3.1 are not affected by Your own such litigation, and survive.

3.3 This patent commitment follows the royalty-free, non-exclusive model used by the W3C Patent Policy. It is made to keep conforming implementations free to build, consistent with Concert's neutral stewardship.

4. Your representations

4.1 Each Contribution is Your original creation, or You have sufficient rights to submit it under the terms of this Agreement.

4.2 If Your Contribution includes or is based on third-party material (for example, content governed by PEPPOL, UBL, EN 16931, OCDS, or other referenced standards), You will identify that material and its licence when You Submit, so that Concert can keep SIGNET-original IP cleanly separable from referenced third-party standards in accordance with the IP & Licensing Policy.

4.3 If You are employed or engaged, and Your Contribution was created within the scope of that employment or engagement, You confirm that You have received permission to make the Contribution on behalf of that employer, that the employer has waived such rights, or that the employer has executed a corporate version of this Agreement with Concert.

4.4 You are legally entitled to grant the licences in §2 and §3, and to Your knowledge the grants do not violate any agreement or third-party right.

5. No obligation, no warranty

5.1 Concert is under no obligation to use, include, or maintain Your Contribution in any SIGNET Artifact. Inclusion is at the discretion of the relevant working group and the Network Authority, through the standard revision process.

5.2 Except for the express licences and representations in this Agreement, each Contribution is provided "as is", without warranties or conditions of any kind, express or implied.

6. No preferential rights

6.1 This Agreement grants You no ownership interest in any SIGNET Artifact, no exclusivity, no preferential or early access to specifications, and no privileged or accelerated certification path.

6.2 Contribution does not confer membership, governance rights, or commercial advantage. All implementers — including any commercial operator and including Score Networks — access the standard and the certification process on identical terms, consistent with the neutrality firewall in the IP & Licensing Policy.

7. General

7.1 This Agreement is governed by the laws of [JURISDICTION — to be set by counsel], without regard to conflict-of-laws principles.

7.2 This Agreement is the entire agreement between You and Concert concerning Contributions, superseding any prior understanding. Concert may publish revised versions through the Network Authority; revised versions apply only to Contributions Submitted after they take effect.

7.3 If any provision is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue in full force, and the unenforceable provision is modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable while preserving its intent.

7.4 The licences and patent commitments granted for Contributions already included in a published SIGNET Artifact survive any termination of this Agreement or withdrawal of future participation.

How to sign. Code and specification contributions made through Concert's repositories are recorded automatically: the CLA assistant will ask You to accept this Agreement on Your first pull request, and will record Your acceptance against Your commits. For document, dataset, or training-material contributions made outside the repositories, request the signable form at hello@concert.foundation. Organisations whose staff contribute as part of their work should execute the Corporate Contributor Licence Agreement (the entity version of this document), which lets a single authorised signatory cover all of their contributors.