Plain English Licensing for Creators

Your intent.
Legally
yours.

align.fyi gives individual creators access to the same legal mechanisms corporations already use — written in plain English, structured around your actual intent, and accessible without a lawyer.

The Problem

Three options.
None of them good.

Creators currently have three ways to license their work. They all fail in different directions — and the gap between them is where most creative work actually lives, unprotected and unclear.

A clearly written plain English document that unambiguously states creator intent is legally meaningful. You don't need archaic legal language to have an enforceable agreement. You need clarity.

Full Copyright
Maximum protection, maximum friction. Requires lawyers. Enforced by mood and whim. Your actual intent is never clearly communicated — everyone guesses.
Existing Open Licenses
Creative Commons, MIT, GPL require fluency in a framework someone else designed. None of them anticipated AI training. Your work doesn't fit neatly inside them.
Nothing
The default for most creators. Hope people do the right thing. Legitimate uses create anxiety. Illegitimate uses happen anyway. Nothing changes.
What it is

Additive by design.
Plain by necessity.

Start from zero rights granted. Add only what you want to permit. The result reflects what you actually thought about — not what you forgot to restrict.

01
Additive Composer
Zero permissions as the baseline. Add only what you want to allow. More honest than carving exceptions from maximal protection — the license only contains what you considered.
02
Plain Speech Output
Legally grounded, human readable. Courts already respect intent in contract law. Complexity doesn't equal validity — it usually just creates ambiguity that favors the party who wrote it.
03
First-Class AI Clauses
Training permissions, output rights, commercial AI use — built in from day one. The territory CC, MIT, and GPL never addressed. Treated here as a primary concern, not an afterthought.
04
Permanent Public Record
Cryptographically timestamped, version-tracked, revocation-visible. A permanent license is a promise. A revocable one is a policy. align.fyi makes you choose which one you're making.
05
Machine-Readable
Platforms and AI pipelines can detect and respect your license automatically. Your intent travels with your work — without relying on anyone to read a README.
06
Community-Extensible
New clauses don't require institutional consensus. Anyone can propose. Confidence levels reflect legal maturity. New use cases addressed at the speed problems are identified, not committees.
Core Philosophy
align.fyi takes no positions on ethics, politics, or what counts as acceptable use. It records what creators think. The consequences of those choices belong to creators and users — not the platform.
Intent Over Rules✦
Plain Speech Is Legally Meaningful✦
Additive Not Subtractive✦
No Institutional Capture✦
Consequences Belong to Individuals✦
Permanent Record of Creator Intent✦
Your Intent. Legally Yours.✦
Intent Over Rules✦
Plain Speech Is Legally Meaningful✦
Additive Not Subtractive✦
No Institutional Capture✦
Consequences Belong to Individuals✦
Permanent Record of Creator Intent✦
Your Intent. Legally Yours.✦
Who it's for

Communities that already know the problem.

These creator communities live by informal versions of the norms align.fyi formalizes. They understand the problem viscerally — and they're the proof of concept.

📖
Collaborative Fiction
SCP Foundation built a shared universe across thousands of contributors with no central legal authority. Every dispute it ever faced traces to intent that was never formally recorded at contribution time. align.fyi solves exactly this.
🎮
Game Modding
Paid mods chaos, total conversion grey areas, asset reuse disputes — all trace to creator intent never formally recorded in a binding, legible way. The community has developed sophisticated norms. They need infrastructure to express them.
🎨
Open Characters Movement
Creators releasing characters for anyone to use currently do so through Twitter posts and README files — none of which are permanent, legally meaningful, or machine-readable. align.fyi gives those wishes formal expression that travels with the work.
🥽
VRChat & 3D Asset Creators
Avatar creators express licensing intent through platform listings easily overridden by platform policy. The community already has its own norms and terminology. align.fyi formalizes what they already know they want.
Roadmap

Four phases to full system.

Building in the right order — clause language before interface, interface before community, community before ecosystem.

Phase 01
Core Clause Set
  • Seven fundamental license axes
  • Universal AI clause set
  • CC-equivalent rewrite in plain speech
  • Revocability options
  • Clause dependency map
Phase 02
Composer Interface
  • Drag-and-drop clause selection
  • Ambiguity detection & prompting
  • Conflict detection & warnings
  • Plain English output generation
  • Permanent public URL per license
Phase 03
Community Extension
  • Clause submission interface
  • Confidence level display
  • Community clause library
  • Domain-specific clause sets
Phase 04
Ecosystem
  • Cryptographic timestamps
  • Public revocation record
  • Platform integration docs
  • AI pipeline compliance

Get notified
at launch.

align.fyi is in active development. Be the first to know when the composer goes live — and help shape the clause library if you're in one of the communities above.

You're on the list. We'll be in touch before launch.

No spam. Just a heads-up when we're ready.