RSL: Publishers Push New Licensing Standard to Charge AI Scrapers
Publishers are launching the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard to give web publishers machine-readable ways to set licensing terms for AI scrapers. RSL adds licensing options to the robots.txt protocol with choices such as free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl and pay-per-inference (pay when content is used in AI responses).
Who’s involved
- Yahoo (Engadget’s parent)
- Medium
- People Inc.
- O’Reilly Media, Ziff Davis, The Daily Beast, wikiHow and others
RSL Collective & enforcement
The RSL Collective, a new nonprofit led by former Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds and RSS co-creator Eckart Walther, will manage licensing and royalty collection—similar to music-rights organizations like ASCAP. Fastly is partnering with RSL to act as a technical gatekeeper to help enforce terms at the edge.
Debates & legal questions
Honoring RSL depends on AI companies complying; robots.txt has historically been ignored by some scrapers. RSL backers argue collective enforcement and recent legal settlements show there’s money at stake. Still, whether AI firms will adopt the standard remains uncertain.
Notable quote
“The RSL Standard gives publishers and platforms a clear, scalable way to set licensing terms in the AI era.” — Reddit CEO Steve Huffman
More info
- Engadget overview: Engadget: Reddit, Yahoo, Medium adopt new RSL standard
- Fastly blog: Fastly: Control and monetize your content with the RSL standard
What do you think? Should AI companies be required to pay publishers when their content trains or appears in models? Share your thoughts below.