FCL · AN OPEN STANDARD FOR PROGRAMMABLE COPYRIGHT · DRAFT V0.1.2
Permission at Scale.
A creative world can inspire more work than its owner could ever license one request at a time. Much of it is made by people who would have asked — if getting permission did not cost more than the project could ever justify.
One published permission profile turns those one-off requests into a standing answer.
Every day, people create inside worlds they love and do not own: fan fiction, game mods, tabletop adventures, convention merchandise, videos, comics, generative images, and things that do not yet have names.
Each one raises a permission question.
May I use this character? This setting? This logo? May I sell what I make? May I use AI to help create it? May I train an AI model on it? How close to canon may I go? Which parts of this world are open to me?
Copyright gives the owner the right to answer those questions. What it does not provide is a practical way to answer them at scale.
Today, the choices are usually crude. A use is forbidden, tolerated, arguably fair, or individually licensed. And an individual license is built for a world of major deals: lawyers, negotiations, approvals, contracts, months of work.
That system can handle a film adaptation.
It cannot handle ten thousand people who each want to make something small.
So most of them never ask. If the work gets made anyway, everyone involved — the owner, the creator, and the platform carrying it — inherits uncertainty nobody deliberately chose.
The Franchise Creative License (FCL) is designed to replace that uncertainty with published permission.
A rights holder publishes one permission profile for a fictional world. That profile separates the different things a creator might actually want to do and lets the owner set rules for each of them independently: using the setting, using characters, making commercial products, working near canon, using official assets, creating with AI, training models, and more.
The rules can also differ by medium, because what works for prose may not work for a tabletop supplement, a video, a game mod, or a generative model.
Every covered element is placed into one of three fixed tiers:
Commons is the low-friction lane. Use may proceed without registration where the applicable profile permits it.
Controlled is the managed lane. Use requires registration or other stated conditions, which may include reporting, payment, or approval.
Canon is the reserved lane. It is not available through standing FCL permission and requires a separate grant.
The tier identifies how access to an element is governed. The profile’s layers and medium-specific configurations determine what may actually be done with it.
That is what programmable copyright means here.
The underlying rights do not change. The owner retains full copyright protection while gaining a more precise way to grant subsidiary permissions for specific uses of the work.
What changes is not ownership, but the way those permissions are expressed.
Instead of answering thousands of requests individually, the owner can publish a permission profile: deliberately, publicly, and before anyone needs to ask.
And a published permission has to do two things if creators are expected to build on it.
First, it has to hold.
If a work was created in compliance with a published profile, a later revision should not retroactively make that work unauthorized. A rights holder can evolve the profile as the world, technology, and circumstances change, while work created under an earlier version remains governed by the terms that applied when it was made.
Second, it has to be findable.
A permission nobody can locate behaves exactly like a permission that was never given. FCL profiles are therefore registered and versioned, and works created under them can be linked to the applicable profile version. A certification mark points back to the applicable registry record; the registry preserves the profile version and terms the creator relied upon.
The FCL is one of three related instruments built on the same permission model.
The FCL covers fictional worlds: their characters, settings, lore, canon, assets, and commercial use.
The CRL — Content Reaction License covers finished works used in reaction, commentary, review, and related transformative media: films, television, music, streams, and other published content.
The HPL — Human Performance License covers a person's own face, voice, likeness, and performance — rights that belong to the human being, not to the fictional world they may have performed in.
Together, they give owners, creators, performers, and platforms a common language for permission.
The timing is not incidental.
The tools for creating convincingly inside someone else's world have gone from specialist to universal in only a few years. Images, voices, video, music, code, games, and entire fictional artifacts can now be produced faster, cheaper, and at vastly greater scale.
Creation scaled.
Permission did not.
Every month that gap grows wider, and more work is made in the twilight: often good work, often made in good faith, but without a clear, documented grant of permission governing the use.
The rules should not be invented after the fact by takedown systems, lawsuits, or platforms forced to create their own private permission regimes.
They should come from the people who own the worlds, the people whose likenesses and performances are at stake, and the creators who build within those boundaries.
And they should exist before the backlog gets any larger.
The FCL Standard is a draft, published openly and intended to be challenged, tested, and improved.
If there is a defect, an ambiguity, or an unintended consequence, we would rather find it now than after someone has relied on it.
TEN LAYERS — WHAT A PROFILE ANSWERS
| LAYER | THE QUESTION IT ANSWERS |
|---|---|
| World / lore | May someone create within this world and its setting? |
| Character | Which characters may they use? |
| Canon status | Can what they create become or claim to be official? |
| Asset | May they use official production assets, or only their own renditions? |
| Likeness | May a real person's face, voice, or performance appear? |
| Commercial | May they earn money, and on what terms? |
| AI generation | May AI tools be used to create the work? |
| AI training | AI training — Does the rights holder permit material from the world to be used for model training? |
| Attribution | What must be credited, disclosed, or identified? |
| Safety | What uses remain prohibited regardless of every other permission? |
Ten questions, answered separately
The appetite for creating inside fictional worlds is enormous — and it is only growing as the tools for creation become faster, cheaper, and more accessible.
People write fiction, build mods, draw comics, make costumes, publish tabletop adventures, produce videos, create games, and increasingly generate entirely new kinds of work inside worlds they did not invent.
What has been missing is a way to grant permission at the same scale.
A rights holder may welcome prose and tabletop publishing while reserving film. They may permit human-written prose while prohibiting generative AI from producing that prose, or allow AI-assisted workflows while reserving fully AI-generated work. They may permit AI-assisted concept art while prohibiting model training. They may allow creators to use the setting freely while requiring registration for named characters. They may also permit commercial use while allowing the rights holder to participate in revenue once a work begins earning.
The medium, the material being used, and the tools used to create the new work are separate permission questions. An FCL profile can answer each independently.
Those are not different degrees of the same question.
They are different questions.
Traditional licensing tends to collapse them into one large yes-or-no decision. If opening a world to fan creation also appears to mean opening it to commercial merchandise, synthetic performers, AI-generated works, or model training, the safest answer is often no.
In a binary system, the most restrictive question ends up deciding all the others.
The FCL separates them.
Instead of one yes or no, a rights holder can publish ten separate answers:
World / lore: open.
Character: named characters controlled.
Canon status: new works created under an FCL profile remain unofficial unless separately designated as canon.
Asset: official production assets reserved; creators may make their own renditions where otherwise permitted.
Likeness: subject to the performer’s permission, or that of the party legally authorized to act for them.
Commercial: permitted under stated terms, including any applicable revenue-sharing arrangement.
AI generation: permitted for some media.
AI training: prohibited.
Attribution: credit and disclosure requirements are stated in the profile.
Safety: prohibited uses remain off-limits regardless of permissions granted elsewhere in the profile.
That is not a compromise between “open” and “closed.”
It is a more accurate answer.
Each layer stands on its own. Permission in one layer grants nothing in another.
Those answers can also change by medium. A rights holder does not have to apply the same rules to prose, comics, film and video, games, tabletop, merchandise, audio, or other forms of creation. The permissions appropriate for one medium may be entirely different from those appropriate for another.
That means an FCL profile is not simply a more detailed yes or no. It is a structured set of permissions that can reflect what the rights holder actually wants to allow or restrict — by element, by use, by medium, and by method of creation.
One profile can express all of those positions without forcing them into a single switch.
One model, three instruments
The underlying idea is the same across the FCL family:
Permission granted in advance, under published conditions, for someone to create from or with rights controlled by someone else.
Three instruments share that model because the subject of the permission differs.
The FCL — Franchise Creative License covers fictional worlds: their settings, characters, lore, canon, assets, and the new works others may create within them.
The CRL — Content Reaction License covers finished works used in reaction, commentary, review, and related transformative media: films, television, music, streams, and other published content.
The HPL — Human Performance License covers a person's identity and performance: their face, voice, likeness, and performance rights, administered by that person or the party legally authorized to act for them.
The three instruments can interoperate, but none substitutes for the others.
A franchise owner can grant permission to use a character. That does not automatically grant permission to reproduce the face or voice of the performer who played that character.
A film owner can authorize reaction use of the film. That does not automatically open the fictional world for new derivative stories.
Each instrument answers the question that belongs to it.
The specification is open and published under CC BY 4.0. Implementing it is royalty-free.
Where it stops
The FCL gives rights holders a more precise way to express permission. It does not alter the scope of the rights they already hold.
It does not change copyright.
A profile makes explicit what a rights holder chooses to permit and nothing more. Anything not expressly permitted remains reserved.
It is not mandatory.
A world without an FCL profile is exactly where it was before. No permission is implied, no rights are surrendered, and nothing is lost by choosing not to participate.
The standard is not an enforcement system.
The FCL Standard defines permissions. It does not scan content, issue takedowns, adjudicate violations, or enforce rights.
Separate implementations — including the proposed FCL-as-a-Service (FaaS) federation — may use FCL permission data as input to compliance and enforcement workflows. They may help platforms determine whether a use conforms to a published profile, route disputes, or provide the information needed to act.
The decision to enforce belongs to the rights holder or platform using that information, not to the FCL Standard Foundation.
It is not a rights organization.
The Foundation does not own, administer, license, or enforce anyone’s intellectual property, likeness, or other rights. It does not negotiate licenses or pursue claims on behalf of rights holders.
Its role is to steward the standard, certification program, and related interoperability rules.
It does not replace bespoke licensing.
A profile handles the thousands of permission questions that cannot realistically be negotiated one at a time.
It is a standing answer, not the only answer.
The fifty-million-dollar licensing deal has always been possible. It can afford lawyers, negotiations, approvals, and months of work.
The five-hundred-dollar opportunity usually cannot.
The FCL is infrastructure for the long tail of licensing: millions of smaller uses that traditional licensing was never economical enough to serve.
The deal worth putting lawyers in a room still gets one.
Documents
Current drafts of the core specification, RSL binding, and governance.