Today, we're announcing OpenIP, our approach to intellectual property that puts builders, developers, and entrepreneurs at the center of innovation. At Block, we believe that intellectual property (IP) should serve as a foundation for collaboration, creativity, and economic empowerment, not as a barrier to progress. Intellectual property should never stifle innovation. Therefore, we are expanding our approach to IP rights, through an initiative called OpenIP.
Innovation thrives in open ecosystems where builders can create, iterate, and improve upon each other's work without fear of unnecessary legal retaliation from Block. The internet began with a pledge to openness: Tim Berners-Lee and CERN chose to put fundamental web technologies . This decision enabled explosive growth; every website, browser, and web application exists because these core technologies remained open.
Today's innovation landscape is more complex. Companies need patent portfolios to defend against bad actors and protect their ecosystems. But we can achieve the same openness through defensive patent pledges. Like the early internet pioneers, we're choosing to remove IP barriers for good faith builders while maintaining the tools needed to protect innovation from those who would abuse it.
OpenIP represents our commitment to three core principles:
Builders First: We develop tools and technologies to advance the state of the art, never to impede it. Our IP portfolios exist to protect innovation and prevent bad actors from claiming rights over our unclaimed innovations, not to create barriers for good faith builders.
Build in the Open: We prioritize transparent, publicly accessible forms of intellectual property that allow ecosystem participants to understand, engage with, and build upon our work.
Patent Pledge: We will commit to using our pledged patents only defensively. We will not assert pledged patents against good faith actors working to advance innovation. While our internal approach has always favored innovation over litigation, OpenIP transforms that philosophy into an external commitment. For the first time, developers have a public pledge they can rely on when building on Block's innovations.
We’re beginning this initiative with a concrete step: pledging our content streaming, personalization and artist compensation patents under the OpenIP framework. These patents cover technologies that improve how listeners discover, share, and interact with songs and playlists, as well as approaches to artist compensation and royalty distribution designed to support accurate accounting and fairness.
By pledging these patents, Block is empowering developers to rely on the innovations underpinning many of TIDAL’s streaming services, artist-first payment models, and artist tools without fear of patent infringement claims from Block.
OpenIP is a first step, not a finished product. We are beginning with these patents because they align most directly with our artist-first mission. We plan to expand to more areas of our portfolio over time, guided by feedback from the community and lessons learned from this launch.
This creates a ripple effect of opportunity: when one company removes patent barriers, innovation accelerates. Smaller developers and startups, who often lack the resources for extensive patent clearance, can now experiment with and deploy technologies that were previously locked behind IP walls. Our intention is to create space for new ideas to thrive. By creating space for new ideas to thrive, this initiative aims to lift artists, right holders, and fans.
This initiative builds on Block's long history of supporting open innovation. We're founding members of the , members of the , and participants in the . We’ve consistently chosen open source licenses for many of our projects and actively contribute to the broader open source ecosystem.
Our January launch of our formalized years of development work we’ve done in open ecosystems such as the Android community with projects like . We recently an Open Source Policy Lab and sponsorship of the Open Source Initiative, as well as the , demonstrating our ongoing commitment to policies and practices that support open innovation. In January 2025, we also launched goose – an open source AI agent that has already gained significant traction within the open source community, reflecting the strong interest in collaborative approaches to AI development. OpenIP is the natural evolution of this work, extending our open approach beyond software to encompass our broader IP strategy.
Transparency matters, especially when it comes to enforcement. We want builders to understand exactly how we approach IP enforcement so they can innovate with confidence.
What constitutes good faith: We consider good faith to include legitimate competition, research, education, and innovation. We do not consider it good faith to monopolize markets, create knock-off products designed to deceive consumers, or engage in patent trolling.
Consumer protection remains paramount: Just as we actively , we reserve the right to continue to use our IP rights to protect consumers from fraud and abuse. Our Cash App social media protection program, which achieved a 98% takedown rate of reported infringements in 2024, is an important element of our broader strategy to keep our customers safe.
This is just the beginning. We plan to expand OpenIP across more of our patent portfolio in the coming months, focusing on areas where open access can drive the most innovation and benefit for builders.
We’re also exploring the creation of an OpenIP consortium, bringing together like-minded companies committed to using their IP rights to foster innovation rather than impede it. If you're interested in joining this effort, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at OpenIP@block.xyz
At Block, we’ve always believed that the best ideas flourish when everyone has the freedom to build upon the work of others. Our patent pledge is an investment in the entire ecosystem.
Innovation happens in an open environment where builders can focus on solving problems rather than navigating legal minefields. OpenIP seeks to remove those barriers, creating predictability and trust that enables builders to do what they do best: build the future.
We invite other companies, builders, and builders to join us in this effort. Together, we can create an IP landscape that serves innovation, empowers builders, and drives economic opportunity for all.