The standard is open. We mean it in writing.
Déjà holds pending patent applications covering parts of how the platform works. None of them will ever be used against someone implementing the receipt standard — and rather than say we intend not to, we've written the commitment down.
The commitment
Déjà, Inc. irrevocably covenants not to assert any patent claim it now owns or later acquires against any person or organisation for making, using, selling, offering, importing or distributing an implementation of the DSR/1.0 specification — including verifiers, producers of conforming receipts, libraries, tooling and derived specifications — to the extent that implementation conforms to the published specification.
- No membership required
- This applies to everyone. It is not limited to customers, to working-group participants, or to anyone we have a relationship with.
- No expiry, no revocation
- It binds Déjà, its successors and any acquirer of the patents. Selling the patents does not release the covenant.
- Includes competitors
- Build a product that competes with ours on this standard, and this covenant still protects you. An evidence format only we can implement would not be a standard.
- One condition, the usual one
- It terminates as to any party that asserts a patent claim against Déjà over an implementation of the standard. Defensive symmetry, nothing more.
The operative text is published with the specification at standard.deja.dev and versioned alongside it. If it is ever weakened, that change is visible in the specification's history — you don't have to trust this page.
Because the alternative doesn't work.
- One
An encumbered standard isn't a standard
We ask audit firms to verify receipts with tooling we don't control. That argument collapses if we retain the right to sue whoever writes the tooling.
- Two
Your evidence has to outlive us
If Déjà disappeared and nobody else could lawfully implement the format, every receipt we ever issued would become a dead file. A covenant is what makes the durability claim real.
- Three
The format isn't what we sell
What we sell is the system that produces receipts and the operation of keeping it running. The receipt format being copyable costs us nothing we wanted to keep.
What's covered, and what isn't.
- Open
The DSR/1.0 specification
Published under Apache-2.0. Receipt envelope, canonicalisation, signing scheme and verification procedure. Implement it freely — the covenant above applies.
- Open
The verifier
dsr-verifier-cliis open source under Apache-2.0. Read it, fork it, build your own, or ship a competing one. v1.7.2 is publicly released, with signed checksums. - Proprietary
The hosted platform
The service that produces receipts — ingestion, examination, scoring, the ledger — is ours, and is the subject of the pending applications. Using our service to build a rival to it isn't permitted by the terms.
- Proprietary
Brand and marks
The Déjà name and marks are ours. Implementing the standard doesn't grant a right to describe your product as Déjà or as endorsed by us.
The patent position, briefly.
Déjà has 4 applications pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office, with an earliest priority date of May 2024, covering aspects of deterministic incident attribution, the receipt-generation pipeline and the append-only chain of custody.
- 18/668,178
- 19/430,349
- CIP March 2026 — application number pending assignment
- SDE Provisional March 2026 — application number pending assignment
We don't publish claim summaries here. Pending claims are not products, and a plain-English paraphrase of a claim reads to most people as a description of shipped capability — which it isn't, and which would contradict the way the rest of this site is written. What the product does today is on how it works, and what it doesn't do yet is on the status page.
The authoritative record is the USPTO filing. Counsel evaluating our position during diligence or a licensing discussion should ask us directly — legal@deja.dev — rather than work from a marketing summary.
Patent pending is not a product claim. Nothing on this page describes a capability, and nothing here should be read as one. It also grants no licence beyond the covenant above.
Building on the standard?
You don't need our permission and you don't need to tell us. But we'd like to hear about it, and if you're implementing a verifier we'll help — a second independent implementation is the strongest possible evidence that the format is what we say it is.