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Trademark

Status: Informative in full. This document states the terms the A202 name is used under. It states no requirement on an implementation of the specification, and nothing in it changes what the specification says.

The mark

A202™ is a trademark of Plural Worlds, the sponsor described in GOVERNANCE.md section 1. The mark is used with ™.

The descriptor "the Verifiable Agreement Protocol for Agent-Led Commerce" accompanies the mark. It is a description of what the protocol is, not an expansion of the letters, which stand for nothing.

The licence does not grant rights in the mark

The specification, the schemas, the fixtures, the manifest, the runner, and the informative documents are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE and CONTRIBUTING.md.

Section 6 of that licence is explicit that it grants no permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the licensor. Copyright and patent permissions come from the licence; permission to use the name does not, and is stated here instead. The two are independent: a fork holds the full copyright and patent grant and holds no rights in the mark.

Nominative use

Using the name to refer to the thing it names is ordinary and is not restricted. That covers:

  • naming the specification, a version of it, a proposal, a reason code, or a schema identifier, in documentation, code, articles, talks, or academic work;
  • describing an implementation by its relationship to the specification, in the form "conforms to A202 v0.1", "implements A202", or "compatible with A202", where the claim is accurate;
  • the identifiers the specification itself defines and an implementation has to reproduce in order to interoperate: the A202- reason-code prefix, the A202-NNNN proposal identifiers, the a202-commercial/0.1 specification version string, the a202-scope/ role scope identifiers, and the schema $id values.

The condition on all of these is accuracy. A claim of conformance that the implementation does not meet is a false claim about the specification as well as about the implementation.

What conformance is claimed through

A conformance claim has a defined mechanism, and it is the conformance grade in conformance/conformance-grades-v0.1.md. Three points from that document bear on how the name may be used alongside a claim.

  1. A grade is reported from an assessment, at the level it was assessed at, and is never inferred at a higher one. An unassessed dimension reads as unassessed.
  2. Running the published conformance suite is something anyone may do, and a self-run result is a legitimate statement by the party that ran it. It is not a grade, because a published fixture can be hard-coded and a self-run result carries no independent evidence that it was not.
  3. No external body recognises a grade. It is a statement by whoever issued it, about one implementation, scoped to one specification version, and no material may describe it as certification by a standards body, a regulator, an auditor, or an insurer.

So "passes the published A202 conformance suite" is a statement a party may make about its own run. "A202 certified" is not a statement this project's machinery can support, from anyone.

What needs written permission

Permission in writing is needed before:

  • using A202 as, or inside, the name of a product, service, company, organisation, or domain, whether alone or joined to another word;
  • using it in a logo, a wordmark, or any styling that presents it as the brand of something other than this specification;
  • using it in a way that suggests this project or its sponsor endorses, sponsors, certifies, or is affiliated with a product, an organisation, or a body;
  • using it so that a reader could take a modified or derived specification for this one. A fork is free to exist and free to say accurately what it derives from, and calling itself A202 would misdescribe which document a counterparty is relying on.

The last is the reason the mark is held at all. A counterparty acting on an A202 record needs the name to identify one specification with one set of rules, and a name that identifies several identifies none.

Requesting permission

Requests, and questions about whether a particular use needs asking, go to hello@a202.org. A use that is not addressed above is a question rather than a refusal.

Trademark stewardship is one of the four rights reserved to the sponsor in GOVERNANCE.md section 6. As that section states, it is control of the name and not editorial control over the specification text.