Sorry I have to disagree with most of you. The MSA only requires anglers fishing in state waters to register if they are fishing for androminous (sp?) fish. Basically that mean stripers. There is no way the feds can enforce this for 99% of the people fishing in RI waters. I can see a lot of guys bluefishing with eels in the future.
So far NONE of the New England states, except for CT have enacted a salt water license and I'd like to see it stay that way. We should all tell the feds to buzz off. Basically the license is a NMFS/MRIP brainstorm, so they don't have to go through the work of creating their own registry. They can see the handwriting on the wall, if the states don't do it, the whole thing is going to fail miserably.