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Tell AI companies what they may do with your work.

Rights management is your written terms for AI use. You decide whether AI systems may crawl your work, answer questions with it, or train on it, and what they owe for each. Your terms travel with everything you sign.

Set up your terms freeSee how it works
Crawling
Search indexing, archives, feeds, and general AI data collection. Encypher calls this Bronze.
AI search
Tools that read your work to answer questions, known as RAGRAG: Retrieval-augmented generation: an AI system that fetches documents first, then writes its answer from them.. Encypher calls this Silver.
Training
Training and fine-tuning AI models. Encypher calls this Gold.

What it does for a publisher

Content marked with rights terms, then a formal notice, then a crawler using the content after notice. Past a dashed line, a small gray gavel labelled For counsel and courts shows that outcomes are for courts, not the mark.
Marking plus notice removes the claim that nobody knew. What follows is for counsel and courts.
Your terms, in one place
Decide once what AI systems may do with your work, and what they owe for each use, such as credit or payment.
Terms that travel
Each article or file you sign carries a link to your terms, so a copy found elsewhere still points back to them.
A record you can point to
The record shows which terms you set and when. In a licensing talk, you can show what you asked for.
Free to set up
Setting terms and signing are free, and you keep all of your licensing revenue.

How it works

Five things an AI system can report about a story: fetched, used in an answer, cited, shown and clicked. The story's label rides through all five; only the fetch shows up in the publisher's own logs.
Of the five steps, a publisher sees only the fetch in its own logs. The rest has to be reported.

  1. Set your terms.

    Pick your terms for crawling, AI search, and training once. They cover all the work you sign.

  2. Sign your work.

    Each document gets a C2PAC2PA: The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity: the group that publishes the open standard for content labels. label with a link to your terms.

  3. We publish the policy.

    Your terms become a policy for each document, at a stable web address.

    How usage reports work

  4. AI systems ask.

    A system sends its planned use. It gets an answer, the rules that matched, and any duties.

The record shows the terms you set and the answer given. It does not prove ownership, permission, or infringement.

The answers an AI system gets

When an AI system asks whether it may use a piece of your work, for example for training, it gets one of five answers.

The five answers to a planned use
Usable?Why
PermittedYesYour terms allow it, and every condition holds.
Permitted with dutiesYesYour terms allow it with duties, like credit or payment. The duties come back named.
ProhibitedNoYour terms forbid it.
No matching ruleNo, by defaultYour terms do not cover this use.
InvalidNoThe terms could not be checked safely.

Good questions.

Do AI companies check these terms?

Only if they agree to. An AI company checks your terms when it has agreed to, and you can require that in a data licensing agreement. The record shows which terms you set and when, not whether anyone read them or whether a use was lawful.

Do I need a developer?

No. WordPress and Ghost use a plugin or webhook. Other systems use our APIAPI: Application programming interface: a way for one program to ask another to do a job, such as sign a file..

What if an AI company strips the label?

The public log keeps the original signed record. It shows what was signed and when, not who removed a watermarkWatermark: A mark placed in the content itself, visible or hidden, so it can be found again after the file is copied. or label.

How does it fit with TollBit, ProRata, or Cloudflare bot tools?

It does a different job. TollBit and Cloudflare control which crawlers get in. ProRata shares AI answer revenue. Encypher records what was signed and its terms, and can sit beside any of them.

Does it work with C2PA?

Yes. Signed documents can carry a link to your terms and the policy behind it.

Encypher authored C2PA's standard for unstructured text, published as Section A.7 in C2PA 2.3 and carried forward as Section A.8 in C2PA 2.4. The official C2PA Conforming Products List records Encypher as a conformant generator product at assurance Level 1, with generation and validation coverage across 20 media types (conformance dated May 26, 2026). Encypher's claim-signing and timestamp authorities appear on the official C2PA Trust Lists.

Does it work with RSL?

Yes, for publishing terms. We write and read RSLRSL: Really Simple Licensing: a standard for publishing AI licensing terms that robots.txt can point to. 1.0 files and add the robots.txtrobots.txt: The file on a website that tells crawlers which pages they may fetch. lines RSL tools look for. A token never grants permission.

For engineers

Show the technical detail

The policy format

Your terms are stored as a W3C ODRLODRL: Open Digital Rights Language: a W3C format for writing usage terms that software can read. 2.2 policy, the web standard for rights rules (the current version, from February 2018; there is no ODRL 3.0). Each signed document gets its own policy, bound at signing time. Every answer runs on ODRL; RSL files are for publishing terms.

Endpoints

  • POST /public/rights/odrl/evaluate takes any policy and a planned use. No key needed.
  • GET /public/rights/{document_id}/odrl returns the policy bound to a signed document.
  • POST /verify/advanced?intended_use= returns the rights answer next to the check result.

How the engine decides

  • Same input, same answer. Each answer is stamped odrl-engine/0.2.0 with fingerprints of policy and question, so you can replay it.
  • Unclear, broken, or unsupported input gets a no, never a yes.
  • If a permission and a ban both match, the ban wins.
  • If no rule covers the use, the answer is no, unless you ask for a looser default.
  • No network calls and no outside rules library.

Keep reading

Create. Mark. Endure.

Set your terms once. It is free to start.

Set up your terms freeRead our rights policy