• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, 2 hours ago

Several publishers and tech firms have voiced support for Really Simple Licensing (RSL), a new standard designed to ensure fair compensation for content scraped by AI crawlers.  

RSL was launched along with a nonprofit organization: the RSL Collective, which is to provide collective licensing services.

The new standard allows publishers to add machine-readable licensing and royalty terms to their robots.txt files, specifying how AI agents must compensate them for using their content, going beyond the basic yes/no blocking of the robots.txt protocol

In addition, RSL will support a range of licensing and usage models, including free attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (in which publishers will be paid every time an AI application crawls their content), and pay-per-inference (when an AI application a publisher’s content to generate a response).

RSL is an open, decentralized protocol built on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) a standard that can be applied to any digital content, including web pages, books, videos, and datas 

“RSS was critical to the Internet’s evolution as an information ecosystem, giving early online publishers a simple, open standard to syndicate their content and reach audiences at Internet scale. That spirit of openness is what helped the web thrive,” said Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media. “But today, as AI systems absorb and repurpose that same content without permission or compensation, the rules need to evolve.

The supporters include Reddit, People Inc., Yahoo, Internet Brands, Ziff Davis, Fastly, Quora, O’Reilly Media, and Medium.

Reddit, People Inc., Yahoo, Internet Brands, Ziff Davis, wikiHow, O’Reilly Media, Medium, The Daily Beast, Miso.AI, Raptive, Evolve Media, Ranker, Inspired Taste, Travel Lemming, and CelebrityNetWorth. The standard is also supported by Fastly, Quora, and AdWeek.

The development of the RSL Standard is led by the RSL Technical Steering Committee, which includes Eckart Walther (RSL Collective, co-author RSS), RV Guha (co-author RSS, Schema.org, NLWeb), Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media), Stephane Koenig (Yahoo), and Simon Wistow (Fastly).