Legal
Trademark and brand policy
The code is Apache-2.0 and the corpus is CC BY 4.0. Neither licence grants rights in the name — Apache-2.0 says so explicitly, and CC BY 4.0 covers the corpus rather than the mark. This page is what governs the name and the mark instead.
Draft — pending legal review, and no registration has been filed
This policy has not been through outside counsel and no trademark application has been filed in any jurisdiction, so nothing here is a claim of registered rights. It is published in draft because the alternative — saying nothing while asking people to fork the project — is worse. Read it as the project’s stated intent. It may change on review, and any change will be announced on the blog.
What the mark covers
The word OpenRegs — one word, capital O, capital R — and the bracketed mark shown in this site’s header. Not the code, not the corpus, not the file formats, and not the ideas: those are licensed and you need no permission from us for them.
The short version
Use the name to say something true about OpenRegs. Do not use it in a way that suggests we published, endorsed, reviewed or vouched for something we did not — most of all where the something is legal data, because a reader who mistakes your corpus for ours may act on it.
| Use | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Saying your software uses OpenRegs | Allowed | “Built on OpenRegs”, “powered by OpenRegs”, “OpenRegs-compatible”. Plain text or the mark, your own product name larger than ours, no implication that we built or checked your product. |
| Writing about the project | Allowed | Articles, talks, comparisons, criticism, course material, screenshots of the site or the CLI. Accuracy is the only condition. |
| Redistributing an unmodified release | Allowed | Packages, mirrors and container images that ship what we published, byte for byte, may say so and may carry the mark. openregs verify should still pass against it. |
| A fork you have changed | Ask first | Rename it. Keep an accurate attribution line — “a fork of OpenRegs” — but the project’s own name, package name and mark have to be yours, because a bug in your fork should not read as a bug in ours. |
| Naming a regime corpus | Ask first | regime-* names under the OpenRegs organisation identify corpora we publish and stand behind. Publish your own as, for example, acme-regime-fr, in your own namespace. The layout, the spec and the tooling are yours to use freely under their licences. |
| Company, product, domain or app-store names | Ask first | Anything of the form OpenRegs-something, something-OpenRegs, openregs.tld, or a logo derived from our mark. This is where genuine confusion starts. |
| Merchandise, events, certification | Ask first | Including “OpenRegs Certified”, “OpenRegs Partner”, or a conference using the name. No certification programme exists, and saying one does would be a claim about verification — the one thing this project cannot be loose about. |
Forks, in more detail
Forking is a right the licences grant and this policy does not take it back. What it asks is that a fork be identifiable as one. Concretely: a different project name and package name, your own mark, and no suggestion that a release you built is a release we built. The engine records the commit and digests a release was produced from and can prove it offline, so the honest version of “this is not upstream” is also the checkable one.
The same applies to a modified corpus. A regime release carries the source documents, digests and retrieval instants behind every canonical text; if you change the data, the thing you publish is no longer the thing those digests describe, and it should not carry our name.
Brand assets
The mark is an atom of law between two brackets, drawn on a four-unit grid so it stays sharp at favicon size. Reproduce it in one flat colour — any colour that reaches 3:1 against its background — and leave clear space around it of at least the width of one bracket stem. Do not rotate it, stretch it, outline it, add a gradient, or set it inside another shape.
- Mark, ink
#0A0A0A— for light backgrounds. - Mark, paper
#FAFAFA— for dark backgrounds. - Brand blue
#1F6CB0, and#73B0EEwhere the background is dark. One accent, used sparingly; everything else in the palette is a true neutral. - The wordmark is the word set in the surrounding text’s own sans-serif at semibold or bolder, optically aligned with the mark. We do not licence a display typeface, so freezing letterforms into an asset would claim a specificity the brand does not have.
Write it OpenRegs. Not “Open Regs”, “OpenREGS”, “Openregs” or “OR”. Lower-case openregs is correct where the medium requires it — the command, the package, the organisation, the domain.
Asking, and withdrawal
Anything marked “ask first” is a conversation, not a refusal. Open a discussion on the GitHub organisation describing the use. Permission, if given, is for the use described, is not transferable, and can be withdrawn if the use becomes misleading — in which case we will say what changed and allow a reasonable period to make the change.
This policy governs the name only. Nothing on this page limits what the Apache-2.0 licence grants for the code or the CC BY 4.0 licence grants for the corpus, and nothing on it is a restriction on nominative or fair use under the law that applies to you.