A New Framework for AI Permissions in Entertainment: RSL Media’s Human Consent Standard

What Is RSL Media and Why Does the Human Consent Standard Matter?

On May 12, 2026, RSL Media launched as a public benefit nonprofit co-founded by CEO Nikki Hexum, Cate Blanchett, Doug Leeds, and Eckart Walther. Its mission is to make human consent machine-readable and discoverable to AI systems through the Human Consent Standard, which allows any individual to declare whether AI systems may use their creative works, identity, likeness, voice, characters, or marks. Endorsements from several famous actors and organizations, such as a major talent agency and the Music Artists Coalition, highlight this as one of the entertainment industry’s potential technological answers to unauthorized AI exploitation.

RSL Media builds on the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard, an open protocol launched in late 2025, enabling machine-readable AI usage terms for website content, now claiming support from over 1,500 publishers, brands, tech companies, and media organizations. While the original RSL addressed content at a specific URL, the Human Consent Standard applies to “the underlying work, identity, character, or mark itself, wherever it appears.”

How Does the Standard Work?

The standard uses a traffic-light model. Individuals set permissions as “allowed,” “allowed with terms,” or “prohibited” across four categories: creative works (songs, films, books, art), identity (name, image, likeness, voice, movement), characters (fictional characters and distinctive traits), and marks (logos, trademarks, trade dress). RSL Media states that it will launch a free public registry in June 2026 to translate these declarations into machine-readable signals that AI platforms can query before ingesting or generating protected material.

Is It Enforceable?

The voluntary standard sits at the intersection of copyright, right of publicity, trademark, and emerging federal legislation, and does not carry the force of law. There is currently no federal law on right of publicity. State right-of-publicity laws vary dramatically across jurisdictions, creating a fragmented compliance landscape. The standard functions as a practical evidentiary tool, establishing documented proof of an individual’s expressed consent preferences that could support claims under existing frameworks.

As the law and regulation of AI in this area are still nascent and continue to develop, it remains to be seen whether there will be any legal consequences for AI services that ignore registry settings. Several lawsuits have been initiated invoking copyright, trademark and publicity rights, but the law will likely not be settled until courts provide more thorough interpretation of AI activities within the framework of existing law, and the federal and state legislatures address AI through new laws.  Without statutory backing, bad-faith actors can decline to query (or affirmatively circumvent) the registry, and the standard provides no independent cause of action.

Where Does Federal Legislation Stand?

The NO FAKES Act, reintroduced in April 2025 by a bipartisan coalition and revised in May 2026, would establish a federal intellectual property right over an individual’s voice and visual likeness, prohibiting unauthorized digital replicas (or deepfakes). The legislation employs a DMCA-style notice-and-takedown regime with safe harbor provisions for compliant platforms.

If enacted, the NO FAKES Act could potentially give legal teeth to the RSL Media registry. For example, an AI company’s failure to query or honor declared permissions may constitute evidence of knowing disregard for federally protected rights. Conversely, the registry could serve as the practical infrastructure through which platforms satisfy due diligence obligations under such legislation.

As of June 2026, the NO FAKES Act has not yet been enacted. Practitioners should track its progress closely, as passage could fundamentally alter the standard’s enforceability calculus.

What Does This Mean for Entertainers, Creators, Studios, and Platforms?

For performers and entertainers, the standard could provide a scalable mechanism to assert control over digital replicas without individual negotiation with each AI developer. A prominent talent agency has endorsed the standard as providing “clear, enforceable control,” ensuring artists “receive the credit and compensation they deserve in the AI economy.”

For individual creators and influencers who lack established representation, it offers a free, accessible tool, where previously only those who could “afford lawyers or have platforms big enough to be heard” could assert these rights.

For studios, production companies, and platforms, the registry provides a centralized clearance mechanism—a single query point for AI usage permissions that reduces legal risk and streamlines licensing workflows.

How Might the Standard Impact Talent Contracts?

Talent representatives should consider contractual provisions permitting and requiring registration and maintenance of accurate RSL Media permissions on behalf of their clients to ensure that artists and creators are protected to the fullest extent possible. The “allowed with terms” tier opens a structured licensing channel, and individuals can signal their willingness to license their likeness or works to AI systems in exchange for compensation, potentially creating a new revenue stream administrable at scale.

Adoption will likely be driven by reputational risk: responsible AI companies will query the registry voluntarily, and the endorsement of a prominent talent agency and high-profile talent suggests compliance could become a de facto industry expectation.

What Are the Challenges and Risks?

• Fragmentation. The AI permissions space already contains competing protocols and approaches, for example, TDM AI, TDMRep (Text and Data Mining Reservations Protocol), Spawning’s ai.txt, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) AI Preferences draft, and Cloudflare’s Pay per Crawl. Multiple standards risk the very fragmentation that the Human Consent Standard seeks to resolve.
• Scope ambiguities. The standard’s four rights categories overlap with distinct legal regimes carrying different ownership rules, duration, and transferability. How the registry handles jointly owned works, works made for hire, or studio-owned characters remains unspecified.
• International limits. AI training and content generation are inherently global, and cross-border enforceability is uncertain, particularly in jurisdictions without robust publicity or personality rights.
• Power imbalances. Entities controlling distribution could condition employment or licensing on talent granting broad AI permissions—effectively converting the “allowed with terms” tier into a standard contract concession.
• Practical application. Even if widely adopted, the standard may have a limited effect if AI services can obtain similar content from sites and platforms that do not use the standard.

Conclusion: Three Questions That Will Shape the Standard’s Impact

The standard’s long-term significance depends on at least three variables: (1) whether the NO FAKES Act (and possibly other legislation) is enacted to provide enforcement mechanisms; (2) whether major AI developers voluntarily integrate registry queries into their pipelines; and (3) whether the standard can resist contractual dynamics that might weaken it as a protective tool due to unequal bargaining power enabling more powerfully positioned business partners to obtain broad AI permissions from those with limited bargaining power.

Practitioners and managers representing entertainment clients should monitor the June 2026 registry launch closely and begin evaluating how existing talent agreements interact with this new consent infrastructure.