The Amiably Unburdensome Royalty-Free License (AURFL) is intended to provide a way for fellow aspiring creatives, business people, and internet personalities to offer royalty-free products (such as reusable art or design or game dev assets, or any other product for which a royalty-free license makes sense) with a license that carefully balances broad headache-free freedoms for the licensee (the user) with protecting the authorial and economic rights of the licensor (the creator, the business).

Essentially, the license is a kind of middle ground between open licenses like the famous Creative Commons licenses and closed licenses like typical proprietary royalty-free licenses.

Critically, the license provides some legal safeguards against your content being stolen and derived from by artificial intelligence software. It reduces the ability for AI users to argue that their use of your data is "fair" or "just inspiration". Specifically, the terms and conditions make it easier to scare and prosecute and punish violators who upload your work into AI systems.

I have yet to see any other license offer hardly any protection against AI theft, despite the immense and prevalent and rising risk of such, so this may be one of the very first such licenses to cover that!

It is clear that going forward creators and business will be wise to be proactive in protecting against systematic automated theft such as AI! As such, you would be wise to account for it in some way in your terms!

I plan to use such a license for my own creations as I design them and post them on Gumroad and elsewhere and noticed that I couldn't find any pre-existing license that met the above criteria (i.e. both fewer headaches for licensees than traditional royalty-free licenses and greater protection against exploitation, theft, and AI).

The license itself (the text document) is actually licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license and is free for anyone to use. It is hosted on Gumroad simply as an easy way to support donations for my creative work and for any future time and effort for maintenance of the license.

This package includes:

1. A finished PDF copy of the license, ready for use, exported using the high quality archival PDF/A-3b standard.
2. The original fully editable LibreOffice (OpenOffice) document from which the license PDF was produced.
3. An automatically generated DOCX version of the license for Microsoft Word, exported from LibreOffice and hence likely not 100% identical, for users who don't have (or don't want to download) LibreOffice just to edit the license.
4. Zip files for the fonts used in the LibreOffice document, for your convenience in case you don't have the fonts on your computer, including all available font file format variants (OTF, TTF, VF, WOFF, WOFF2) and an explanation.

I would suggest that you read the license carefully and change anything you don't like to suit your purposes. If you do so, you should indicate somewhere that you've edited the license and perhaps even rename it if your changes are extensive enough.

Remember though that the attribution and share-alike traits of the document's license require that you continue to leave my name (internet alias) and website link somewhere and mention the fact that you derived the license from mine on your document.

Other than that, feel free to do what you want/need with it! You could even just extract the parts you want (like the anti-AI terms) and then cite and link to my site as credit for my part of the time and labor.

Anyway, I hope you find the license useful for your creative and business endeavors!

Thanks for visiting and reading my page!