New 'Really Simple Licensing' Protocol Aims to Revolutionize AI Content Usage
10 Sources
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Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions.
Leading Internet companies and publishers -- including Reddit, Yahoo, Quora, Medium, The Daily Beast, Fastly, and more -- think there may finally be a solution to end AI crawlers hammering websites to scrape content without permission or compensation. Announced Wednesday morning, the "Really
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RSS co-creator launches new protocol for AI data licensing | TechCrunch
In the wake of Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement, the AI industry is coming to terms with its training data problem. There are as many as 40 other pending cases that seek damages for unlicensed data -- including one that takes Midjourney to court for creating images of
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Online Media Brands Hope a New Protocol Will Stop Unwanted AI Crawlers
Imad is a senior reporter covering Google and internet culture. Hailing from Texas, Imad started his journalism career in 2013 and has amassed bylines with The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, Tom's Guide and Wired, among others. Online media brands, including Yahoo, Quora and Medium,
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AI's free web scraping days may be over, thanks to this new licensing protocol
Media companies announced a new web protocol: RSL.RSL aims to put publishers back in the driver's seat.The RSL Collective will attempt to set pricing for content. AI companies are capturing as much content as possible from websites while also extracting information. Now, several heavyweight
[5]
Reddit, Ziff Davis Back New Idea to Stop AI From Ruining the Internet
Don't miss out on our latest stories. Add PCMag as a preferred source on Google. It's safe to say AI is reinventing the internet. But at the same time, it threatens the foundation upon which it stands: Information. Chatbots consume and regurgitate information from across the web, but they lack a
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New RSL spec wants AI crawlers to show a license or pay
Content creation and delivery companies have introduced a digital licensing mechanism in an effort to compensate media makers when AI companies use their work. The Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard is intended to provide websites with a programmatic way to present web crawlers with licensing
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Publishers are fighting back against AI with a new web protocol - is it too late?
Media companies announced a new web protocol: RSL.RSL aims to put publishers back in the driver's seat.The RSL Collective will attempt to set pricing for content. AI companies are capturing as much content as possible from websites while also extracting information. Now, several heavyweight
[8]
Reddit, Yahoo, Medium and more are adopting a new licensing standard to get compensated for AI scraping
With web publishers in crisis, a new open standard lets them set the ground rules for AI scrapers. (Or, at least it will try.) The new Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard creates terms that participants expect AI companies to abide by. Although enforcement is an open question, it can't hurt that
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The AI-Scraping Free-for-All Is Coming to an End
You can divide the recent history of LLM data scraping into a few phases. There was for years an experimental period, when ethical and legal considerations about where and how to acquire training data for hungry experimental models were treated as afterthoughts. Once apps like ChatGPT became
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Reddit to Yahoo: Why RSL AI license is getting traction with online publishers
The battle over who controls online content - and who gets paid for it - is heating up. For years, AI companies have scraped the web to feed their models, often without permission or compensation. Publishers, meanwhile, have watched their work fuel billion-dollar technologies while struggling to
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Major internet companies and publishers introduce RSL, a new standard designed to regulate AI's use of web content. This protocol aims to ensure fair compensation for content creators and publishers in the AI era.
A New Era for AI Content Licensing
In a groundbreaking move, leading internet companies and publishers have introduced the 'Really Simple Licensing' (RSL) standard, a new protocol designed to revolutionize how AI companies access and use web content for training their models
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. This initiative comes in response to the growing concerns about AI companies using content without permission or compensation, which has led to numerous lawsuits and a potential crisis in the AI industry2
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Source: Digit
The RSL Standard Explained
RSL, inspired by the 'Really Simple Syndication' (RSS) standard, is an open, decentralized protocol that allows publishers to set clear terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of their content
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. It works by adding a licensing layer to the existing robots.txt file, enabling publishers to specify conditions such as attribution requirements, subscription models, pay-per-crawl, or pay-per-inference arrangements1
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Source: TechCrunch
Key Players and Supporters
The RSL standard has garnered support from major web publishers and tech companies, including Reddit, Yahoo, Quora, Medium, The Daily Beast, Fastly, and Ziff Davis
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. The initiative was co-founded by Doug Leeds, former CEO of Ask.com, and Eckart Walther, a former Yahoo vice president and co-creator of the RSS standard1
.The RSL Collective
To facilitate negotiations and royalty collection, the RSL team has established the RSL Collective, a nonprofit organization modeled after ASCAP for musicians
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. This collective aims to provide a unified platform for content creators to set terms and potentially receive compensation for their work used in AI training2
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Source: The Register
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Challenges and Implications
While RSL offers a promising solution, it faces challenges in implementation. Determining when royalties are due for specific pieces of training data can be complex, especially for large language models
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. Additionally, the success of RSL depends on AI companies' willingness to adopt the system, which may require a shift in their approach to data acquisition2
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.The Future of Web Content in the AI Era
The introduction of RSL marks a significant step towards balancing AI innovation with fair compensation for content creators. As Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, stated, 'RSL builds directly on the legacy of RSS, providing the missing licensing layer for the AI-first Internet'
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. If successful, RSL could reshape the relationship between AI companies and content providers, potentially setting a new standard for ethical AI development and usage in the digital age4
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