ABOUT & CONTACT
A draft looking for its first serious critic.
What this project is, where it came from, and the most useful thing you could send us.
The problem
A person wants to make something new using rights someone else controls — a fictional world, a catalogue, a character, a performance, a face or voice.
Today that transaction has no common vocabulary.
It gets negotiated one deal at a time, often at costs exceeding the value of the work someone wants to make. Or the work proceeds without clear permission. Or it does not happen at all.
The interesting part is that rights holders frequently want to say yes.
What they lack is a way to say yes that is specific enough to preserve meaningful boundaries, durable enough for someone else to rely on, and machine-readable enough to work at the scale at which people now create.
The approach
FCL treats permission as a set of separate questions rather than one yes-or-no switch.
For fictional worlds, those questions are expressed through ten independent permission layers, three named tiers, medium-specific configurations, and a separate declaration of how AI participated in creating the work.
The result is published as a versioned permission profile that can be read by people and resolved by machines.
A creator relying on a valid published profile should not lose that standing merely because the rights holder later changes the rules for future work. The specification therefore preserves the version governing the creator's reliance while allowing the rights holder to evolve later versions as technology, policy, and the fictional world change.
That reliance model is the specification's load-bearing feature.
It is what makes advance permission useful to people who may never have a direct relationship with the rights holder granting it.
Three instruments share the model:
CRL — Content Reaction License covers completed works used in reaction, commentary, review, and related transformative media.
FCL — Franchise Creative License covers living fictional worlds and the new works people create within them.
HPL — Human Performance License covers a person's face, voice, likeness, motion, and performance rights, administered by that person or by a party legally authorized to act for them.
The instruments can interoperate.
None substitutes for the others.
What would be most useful
Adversarial technical review.
This specification has not yet been stress-tested by people who have shipped machine-readable permission systems and watched them encounter real platforms, real rights disputes, real caching, real identity problems, and real incentives.
If that describes you, the most useful thing you could send us is not encouragement.
It is the thing that breaks.
Tell us why a field is underspecified. Why a verifier cannot reliably answer the question we have assigned to it. Why a registry assumption will fail under federation. Why a reliance rule creates an attack. Why a discovery mechanism will not survive caching. Why a terminology choice collides with an existing standard. Or point us to the system that tried something similar before and failed.
Comment on the open issues is especially useful.
Thirteen are listed in FCL-CORE-0.1.2. Among the hardest are multi-party and conflicting rights, the boundary-dispute process, territoriality, and the limits of the reliance envelope when authority changes.
If you are considering a trial implementation, please make contact before building.
We would rather change the specification now than have someone build a system that depends on a defect.
Contact
Comments on any document, change proposals, corrections, interoperability concerns, and errata all go to the same address.
Substantive comments will be acknowledged and addressed in a published disposition accompanying the version that follows them.
The organization
The FCL Standard Foundation is a West Virginia nonprofit corporation formed 24 March 2026 to develop and steward the FCL family of standards and the associated certification marks.
The Foundation is in its initial governance and operating phase. Independent board expansion, tax-exempt recognition, staffing, and operating capacity are still being built out.
The Governance page states what has been completed, what has been proposed, and what remains unsettled.
Five certification-mark applications — FCL, FCL CANON, FCL CONTROLLED, FCL COMMONS, and HPL — are pending with the USPTO.
They were filed by the Foundation in March and April 2026.
Applications are not registrations, and registration is not guaranteed.
Serial numbers and current status are listed on the Governance page and may be independently verified through USPTO TSDR.
The certification rules themselves are also drafts. No certification program is currently operational, and no certification marks are currently authorized for use.
Related work
FCL is not intended to replace adjacent standards where they already solve a different part of the problem.
Really Simple Licensing and the Human Consent Standard address machine-readable AI permissions, restrictions, and licensing signals associated with protected works, identities, characters, and other rights subjects.
C2PA Content Credentials address provenance: recording and verifying information about where digital content came from, how it was created, and how it has changed.
FCL addresses the permission and standing of the creative use itself: what someone may create with rights controlled by another party, under what conditions, and which version of those conditions continues to govern the resulting work.
Where the systems meet, the goal is interoperability rather than duplication.
The Interop documents describe those boundaries in detail.
The longer argument
The framework is described at greater length in a forthcoming book.
The book is not required reading for anything published here, and it is not offered as authority for the standard.
The specification is the artifact.
If the argument in the book is sound but the specification cannot survive implementation, the specification has to change.