A Modern Framework for Digital Ownership
Elthian Licensing is a practical rights framework for the AI era, built to help creators and publishers state, signal, and enforce how their content may be used by intelligent systems.
It is designed to be coherent, implementable, and machine-readable, without turning the web into an adversarial battlefield.
Not restrictive. Not performative. Simply a system that respects authorship, enables legitimate use, and creates trust.
Why Elthian Licensing Exists
AI has changed the meaning of “use”.
Content is now crawled for discovery, ingested for training, embedded into retrieval systems, and incorporated into products in ways that traditional licenses were never designed to express clearly.
Elthian builds on emerging standards like Really Simple Licensing (RSL) 1.0 and complementary signals such as robots.txt, HTTP headers, and authenticity initiatives like C2PA, offering creators a flexible, self-managed alternative, or supplement, to broader collective frameworks.
Creators need a structure that:
- clarifies permitted AI use (search, assistance, training, and product use),
- limits unauthorized reuse and substitution,
- strengthens authorship evidence, and
- integrates directly into modern publishing workflows.
Elthian Licensing is our answer: a rights framework aligned with the realities of AI search, RAG, and model development.
Core Components
1. License Suite for AI Use
A set of standardized licenses designed specifically for AI-era use cases, forming a clear control ladder:
- NoAI (no AI access of any kind, including crawling, training, embeddings, or product use),
- NoTrain (discovery and citation allowed, training prohibited),
- UseOnly (human-in-the-loop assistance allowed, expressive output prohibited),
- NonCommercial (AI use allowed only for non-commercial purposes),
- Public (broad reuse, including commercial use and training),
- Custom (fine-grained, policy-driven controls across search, training, RAG, product use, and outputs).
These licenses are designed to be readable by humans, machine-readable for platforms, and defensible in practice.
| License | AI Training | AI Search | Product / RAG Use | Derivative AI Output | Typical Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elthian-NoAI | ❌ Prohibited | ❌ Prohibited | ❌ Prohibited | ❌ Prohibited | Sensitive, proprietary, paid, or personal content |
| Elthian-NoTrain | ❌ Prohibited | ✅ Allowed (referential only) | ❌ Prohibited | ❌ Prohibited | Publishers who want discovery without ingestion |
| Elthian-UseOnly | ❌ Prohibited | ❌ Prohibited | ✅ Allowed (internal, human-in-the-loop) | ❌ Prohibited | Enterprise internal copilots, assistants, workflows |
| Elthian-UseOnly + Search | ❌ Prohibited | ✅ Allowed (referential only) | ✅ Allowed (internal, human-in-the-loop) | ❌ Prohibited | |
| Elthian-NonCommercial | ⚠️ Restricted | ⚠️ Restricted | ⚠️ Restricted | ⚠️ Restricted | Academic, research, non-profit use |
| Elthian-Public | ✅ Allowed | ✅ Allowed | ✅ Allowed | ✅ Allowed | Open knowledge, public datasets |
| Elthian-Custom | Configurable | Configurable | Configurable | Configurable | Enterprises, agencies, mixed-policy sites |
2. The WordPress AI Licensing Plugin
A creator-first WordPress plugin that allows publishers to declare, publish, and signal AI usage permissions for their content in a clear, machine-readable way.
The plugin (Lite) enables publishers to:
- Define a default AI usage policy for their site.
- Apply per-post AI usage overrides where required.
- Publish policies via:
llms.txtrobots.txt(virtual, filter-based)- HTTP response headers
- A machine-readable JSON declaration.
- Make AI permissions explicit for:
- Training
- Search/indexing
- Derivative use
- Product or commercial use.
- Maintain full control locally, with no content sharing.
Pro enhancements add:
- Site-wide policy management with granular scope rules (post type, taxonomy, URL patterns).
- Advanced crawler directives and extended HTTP headers.
- Admin tools for policy auditing, history, and compliance visibility.
- Optional registry integration and signed policy declarations.
- Future support for AI-aware structures such as policy-filtered sitemaps.
The Lite plugin is fully functional on its own. Pro extends enforcement, verification, and ecosystem integration.
3. Content-Hash Fingerprinting (Pro)
An optional cryptographic fingerprint generated at publish time to support authorship evidence and dispute clarity, without claiming immutable provenance.
Key characteristics:
- Uses SHA-256 hashing of content at the time of publication.
- Produces a verifiable, timestamped fingerprint.
- Designed to support:
- Authorship claims
- Change detection
- Policy declaration anchoring.
Fingerprints may be surfaced in:
- Machine-readable JSON declarations
- HTML metadata
- Internal admin audit and export tools
This mechanism is intentionally evidentiary, not absolute, and avoids overstating claims of ownership or provenance.
4. Usage and Compliance Signals (Pro)
An extensible set of interoperable signals designed to make AI usage intent explicit to automated systems and downstream consumers.
These signals include:
- Extended HTTP headers for licence declaration and usage constraints.
- Signed policy snapshots and historical records.
- Policy-aware analytics and compliance indicators.
- Structured differentiation between:
- Search/indexing
- Training
- Derivative generation
- Commercial or product use.
Forward compatibility
The system is designed to support future interoperability with:
- Emerging licence standards (e.g. RSL-style models)
- Registry integrations
- Verified dataset exports (allow, restrict, deny)
- Compliance-oriented AI training pipelines.
Design Principles
Clarity
Licensing must be understandable, explicit, and precise, including for edge cases like RAG and search summarization.
Respect
Creators deserve systems that protect their work without blocking legitimate innovation or research.
Neutrality
The framework should work across platforms and toolchains, not lock users into a proprietary ecosystem.
Authenticity
Authorship and origin should be supported by modern evidence mechanisms, not informal assumptions.
Longevity
This is built for the next decade of publishing, not the last decade of licensing.
Who It Is For
Elthian Licensing is designed for:
- creators who want clear control over AI use,
- publishers seeking AI-aware rights management,
- developers who need a clean, interoperable framework,
- platforms that need reliable, machine-readable usage intent, and
- organizations maintaining long-term content archives.
The goal is not to police creativity. The goal is to create conditions where creators and platforms can operate with confidence, transparency, and trust.
Where the Framework Is Heading
Elthian Licensing is in active development. The license suite is being refined, the WordPress toolchain is being built, and the long-term governance structure will be published deliberately.
Future developments may include:
- licensing dashboards and site-wide policy management,
- standardized machine-readable rights metadata formats,
- AI training consent layers aligned with emerging standards (including RSL 1.0),
- automated detection and notification tools,
- platform-level verification and integration options, and
- verified dataset exports (whitelist, greylist, blacklist) for compliant training and research workflows.
The aim is a durable system that supports creators and responsible AI use at scale.
The Elthian Philosophy Behind Licensing
Elthian Licensing is built on a simple idea: ownership still matters, even when the medium changes.
As AI accelerates, clarity becomes infrastructure. Authorship becomes evidence. Intent becomes enforceable.
This framework is our contribution to a future where creators retain agency over their work, and intelligent systems interact with content under clear, transparent rules.