Our Mission

Provide simple, clear licenses everyone can understand.

We want to remove the complexity from licensing so you can focus on what you do best. By making it easy for users to understand exactly what they can and can’t do with your work, we enable true innovation and creativity.

The “Understanding Gap”

We noticed a major problem: most popular licenses are too complex and hard to understand. We believe licenses should be easy to understand for everyone, not just lawyers.

• Confusion slows down innovation. When people aren’t sure they understand a license’s terms, they hesitate to use the work. Multiply that uncertainty by thousands of users, and creativity hits a roadblock.

• Legal documents don’t have to be dense. While others have made important efforts — like Creative Commons ➚ using helpful icons, or groups providing short summaries — the underlying legal text often remains inaccessible ➚. * The CC BY-NC 4.0 license has an average readability level of 15. This means you need a college education to *maybe* understand it. The average American reads at an 8th-grade level, which is the level we wrote this page at. We want to make licenses easy to understand for everyone, not just people with a college education.

• We believe we can do better. Making licenses natively easier to read helps everyone.

How We Fix It: Recrafting Licenses

To solve this problem, we recraft popular licenses of all kinds to make them simpler and clearer.

We take the most widely used licenses and rewrite them in plain language. We strip out unnecessary legal jargon and simplify the structural layout. Our adaptations are complementary to the original licenses; we make it completely clear that the original license still applies if our license is unclear on a legal question, so you don’t lose any protection.

Our Big Plans

We are building a movement to make plain licensing the new standard.

Create a library of simple licenses

We are building a comprehensive library of plain-language licenses you can confidently use for your work. We are starting by recrafting popular existing licenses, but our ultimate goal is to create brand-new licenses that are simple from day one.

Provide tools to help you choose

Selecting a license shouldn’t require a law degree. We will provide interactive tools to help you compare the differences between licenses and easily choose the one that perfectly fits your project’s needs.

Educate people about licensing

We want to help people understand copyright. We are developing resources that explain the basics of licensing, helping creators understand exactly how to protect and share their work.

Spread the word about plain writing

We’ve seen the incredible benefits of plain writing. We want to champion plain writing in the legal field and encourage others to think about accessible writing when creating legal documents.

Drive innovation

Innovation is risky. We believe that by making licensing radically easier to understand, we can reduce that risk — empowering people to try new things, collaborate freely, and share their work in exciting new ways.