AICL — AI Content Licensing Layer

01 · Definition

AICL is the licensing and transaction layer built on top of AICR. Where AICR declares what is allowed, AICL defines how permission is actually obtained: license tiers and prices, quote and payment endpoints, signed license tokens, usage and audit logs, and revocation. It is designed to interoperate with emerging machine-payment mechanisms such as HTTP 402 flows and pay-per-crawl schemes, with agentic payment kept inside human-approved budgets and audit trails.

02 · Purpose

• Convert rights declarations into a workable licensing market instead of a binary open/closed web.
• Standardize the machine-to-machine flow: discover policy → request quote → license → use → audit.
• Keep agentic payments bounded: budgets, approval thresholds, request-bound tokens, full audit logs.
• Give content providers a path to compensation without closing their sites to AI.

03 · Scope

04 · Machine-readable example

This site's own licenses — /.well-known/aicl.json

{
  "version": "0.1",
  "publisher": "AGIRight.org",
  "licenses": [
    {
      "id": "public_read_summary",
      "rights": ["read", "summarize", "quote"],
      "price": { "amount": "0", "currency": "USD" },
      "conditions": [
        "attribution_required",
        "no_model_training",
        "no_commercial_redistribution"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "research_rag",
      "rights": ["read", "summarize", "rag"],
      "price": { "amount": "0", "currency": "USD" },
      "conditions": [
        "attribution_required",
        "retention_days_30",
        "no_model_training"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "commercial_or_training_license",
      "rights": ["training", "commercial_use"],
      "requires_contact": true,
      "contact": "contact@agiright.org"
    }
  ]
}

05 · Limitations

• This site does not operate a payment gateway; commercial licenses are contact-based in v0.1.
• AICL is a protocol proposal — it does not guarantee that AI companies will pay.
• Payment compliance, tax, and financial regulation are out of scope for this draft.
• Token formats and endpoint semantics are experimental and may change.