Notice of Intellectual Property & Reserved Rights

This document clarifies the different forms of Intellectual Property (IP) contained within TheAuditor project and the licenses that govern them.

1. TheAuditor Source Code

The source code for TheAuditor tool itself is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0), as found in the LICENSE file. This license grants you broad permissions to run, modify, and share the code, subject to the "copyleft" and network-use terms of the AGP.

2. Reserved Intellectual Property (Not Licensed under AGPL-3.0)

The AGPL-3.0 license granted for the source code DOES NOT extend to the following intellectual property, the rights to which are reserved exclusively by the author ("TheAuditor Team"):

A. Copyright in the Database Schema

The unique structure, selection, coordination, and arrangement of the tables, columns, indexes, and relationships within the generated databases (e.g., .pf/repo_index.db, .pf/graphs.db) are an original, creative work.

This schema is the copyrighted intellectual property of the author and is not licensed to you under the AGPL. You may not create derivative works based on this schema (e.g., by writing a new tool that queries or populates a database with this specific structure) without a separate commercial license.

B. "Sui Generis" Database Right (EU Directive 96/9/EC)

TheAuditor tool represents a "substantial investment" (in time, skill, and resources) in the "obtaining, verification, or presentation" of the contents of the databases it generates.

As a work created by an EU national, these databases are protected by the EU sui generis Database Right. This right grants the author the exclusive ability to prevent the "extraction" and "re-utilization" of the whole or a substantial part of the database contents.

Commercial Licensing is Required

Any use of TheAuditor in a commercial, proprietary, or "SaaS deployment" context that involves:

Exploiting the database schema, or

Extracting or re-utilizing the contents of the generated databases for a commercial purpose,

...infringes on these reserved rights and is not permitted by the AGPL-3.0 license alone.

A commercial license must be purchased from the author to obtain rights for such use.

For all commercial licensing inquiries, please contact:
https://github.com/TheAuditorTool/Auditor
