15.09.2025
2 min
590
The largest publishing platforms — Reddit, Yahoo, wikiHow, Medium, and others — have announced support for a new open protocol, Really Simple Licensing (RSL), which allows site owners to write AI-friendly terms of use and compensation in robots.txt — from free with attribution to pay-per-crawl and pay-per-inference.
RSL is a decentralized standard built on RSS that scales to millions of sites and covers any format: articles, books, videos, datasets. The protocol adds machine-readable licenses and royalty rules to robots.txt for AI agents and crawlers. Available models include free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl, and pay-per-inference.
Reddit, People Inc., Yahoo, Internet Brands, Ziff Davis, Fastly, Quora, O’Reilly Media, and Medium were the first to publicly confirm their support; the standard is open and free for any site. The development is managed by the RSL Technical Steering Committee (TSC), including Eckhart Walter and Ramant Guha, co-authors of RSS. The idea is to return fair interaction to the openness of the web: AI systems gain access to knowledge, and creators have transparent rules and payment.
The rapid growth of generative AI has led to massive unauthorized content scraping, when site data is included in training sets and chatbot responses without permission or payment. Until now, the web community has relied on robots.txt and private agreements that do not cover licensing. RSL aims to be the missing “licensing layer” on top of the familiar RSS/robots.txt ecosystem, compatible with industry practices.
The launch of RSL could reimagine the economics of access to knowledge in the AI era, giving publishers control and monetization, and modelers clear, machine-readable rules. The success of the standard will depend on the breadth of implementation by major platforms and the good faith of AI vendors in adhering to the terms, but early support from top platforms makes it a chance to strike a new balance between innovation and creators’ rights.
