Chinese robot pictured at Web Summit in Lisbon. Picture: Press Gazette/Dominic Ponsford
A broad coalition of news publishers have backed shared licensing technology which seeks to protect content in the AI era.
Really Simple Licensing (RSL) sets out an agreed way of controlling and monetising journalism which is used to feed large language models.
RSL is being developed by RSL Collective, a non-profit collective rights organisation led by former CEO of IAB Publishing Doug Leeds and former CEO of Cardspring Eckart Walther.
The technology has been endorsed by some 1,500 media organisations around the world including People Inc, Yahoo! and Associated Press.
Based on the widely adopted RSS (Really Simple Syndication) standard, RSL 1.0 augments the simple yes/no blocking rules of robots.txt with what it calls “a universal language for content rights and licensing terms, offering a scalable economic foundation for the AI-first internet”.
The latest iteration of the technology includes additional capabilities for publishers, such as giving search engines permission to include content in search results while opting out of AI search applications and the ability to mandate monetary or in-kind contributions from AI systems that benefit from non-commercial content or data.
As the group set out its official standards specification for RSL on Thursday 11 December, co-founder Doug Leeds answered Press Gazette’s questions about the project.
Will this system still work if AI companies simply ignore it (as many already do when it comes to paywalls and robots.txt)?
“That will be increasingly hard for AI companies to do. Adoption matters, and in just three months RSL support has spread rapidly across the most influential data sources that AI systems depend on. Content delivery networks like Cloudflare and Akamai, which enforce how the web works, also back us.
“Courts and regulators look to industry norms when evaluating reasonable notice, access, or compliance. Once a practice becomes a generally accepted industry standard, it carries legal significance.
“A good example of this is robots.txt. It was never legislated or formally mandated, but once it became the industry standard for signalling access permissions to crawlers, courts treated it as legally meaningful.
“RSL plays a similar role for AI licensing. Our goal is to bring the entire ecosystem on board, and we’re excited about how quickly it’s being embraced.”
RSL promises to control permissions around search and AI access (so separating the two) – but what can it do about companies like Google which has combined the two things?
“ The EU investigation into Google’s policy , which forces publishers to give up content for AI use as a condition of staying visible in search, makes this feature of RSL 1.0 all the more timely.
“RSL 1.0 allows Google to address exactly this concern, giving it a clear, interoperable way to allow publishers to opt out of AI uses without sacrificing their presence in search. It’s the first and only standards-based mechanism that cleanly separates search indexing from AI training and answer generation.
“This is not only a win for publishers. It is a major opportunity for Google. RSL 1.0 gives Google a viable, transparent, industry-backed solution to a problem regulators are already focused on, and a way to show that search and AI can operate on fair and independent terms.”
When will RSL be deployed into the wild?
“ It is now .
“Publishers can join RSL right now. The standard is open, free, and easy to deploy. There are already WordPress and third-party plugins, and for most sites, it is as simple as adding a configuration file.
“Once a publisher adopts RSL, their content becomes visible for licensed AI compensation at internet scale. And by joining the RSL Collective, publishers can participate directly in the revenue model and help ensure they are paid fairly for the use of their work.”
How will RSL support journalism and create revenue or news publishers?
“RSL is for anyone who wants to protect and get paid for their content in the AI era.
“RSL gives news publishers something they’ve never had before: a practical, efficient way to get paid when AI systems use their work. Every time an AI product responds to a prompt with information drawn from a news publisher, RSL turns that into a royalty for the publisher.
“It’s the first system that ties the economics of AI directly to the sustainability of journalism, no matter the size or scope of the news organisation.”
How easy is this technology to implement?
“Implementing RSL is intentionally simple. For most publishers, it works like adding robots.txt or a site map, a lightweight configuration at the CMS level. And this is not theoretical.
“There are already multiple open source implementations, including a full WordPress plugin developed inside the WordPress ecosystem itself, as well as third-party plugins from vendors like Supertab. As a result, RSL will be as easy to implement as a single one-click option in major CMS platforms, including WordPress, so any publisher, large or small, can enable AI licensing in minutes.”
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