Licensing Is Broken
Content licensing today is a manual, slow, and opaque process. A company that wants to license a photograph for a marketing campaign must identify the rights holder, negotiate terms, execute a contract, process payment, and hope the license terms are actually respected downstream. This process takes days to weeks, costs hundreds to thousands in transaction overhead, and creates licensing ambiguity that leads to inadvertent infringement. For AI training data licensing — where millions of assets need to be licensed programmatically — manual licensing is simply impossible.
Programmable Licensing with DRD
DRD introduces programmable licensing through machine-readable license terms attached to registered content. When content is registered, the rights holder defines licensing terms: permitted uses (commercial, editorial, AI training, personal), pricing (per-use, subscription, or custom), geographic restrictions, duration, and attribution requirements. These terms are encoded as structured data in the content's C2PA manifest and DRD registry entry. Any platform or agent can query these terms programmatically and execute a license in real-time — no human negotiation required.
Smart Contract Execution
DRD's licensing engine uses smart contracts to automate the licensing workflow. When a licensee requests content, the smart contract verifies the licensee's identity and trust score, checks that the requested use falls within available license terms, calculates the license fee based on the pricing model, processes payment through integrated payment rails, issues a license credential (a W3C Verifiable Credential proving the license grant), and updates the content's provenance chain with the licensing event. The entire flow executes in under three seconds. The license credential can be verified by any party to confirm the content is legitimately licensed.
Royalty Distribution
For content with multiple rights holders — co-created works, sampled music, collaborative projects — royalty distribution is a major pain point. DRD's licensing engine supports programmable royalty splits defined at registration time. When a license fee is collected, the smart contract automatically distributes funds according to the split configuration: 60% to the primary creator, 20% to the co-creator, 15% to the distributor, 5% to DRD as a platform fee. Distributions are instant and auditable, with every payment recorded on the content's provenance chain.
AI Training Data Licensing
The most transformative application of automated licensing is AI training data. Foundation model companies need to license millions of assets for training, and rights holders need a way to opt in or out of AI training uses. DRD's bulk licensing API enables model trainers to query available assets matching their criteria (subject matter, quality, license type), execute bulk licenses for qualifying content in a single transaction, receive cryptographic proof of licensing for each asset, and include license credentials in their model documentation for compliance. For rights holders, AI training licenses create a new revenue stream with zero marginal effort — terms are set once and licenses execute automatically.
Trust Badges as License Signals
DRD's trust badges extend to licensing status. Content with active licenses displays a 'Licensed via DRD' indicator that platforms can verify programmatically. This creates a visible licensing ecosystem: platforms can prioritize properly licensed content in recommendations, advertisers can ensure they're only using licensed assets, and AI companies can demonstrate their training data is fully licensed. The licensing badge, like the governance badge, is backed by a W3C Verifiable Credential — not just a visual indicator, but a cryptographically verifiable proof of licensing.
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