Reddit, Yahoo, Ziff Davis and more announce support for new AI content licensing standard

The RSL Standard gives publishers and platforms a clear, scalable way to set licensing terms in the AI era. The RSL Collective offers a path to do it together. Reddit supports both as important steps toward protecting the open web and the communities that make it thrive.”

Steve Huffman, CEO, Reddit

As one of the internet’s most trusted brands, Yahoo understands the value of high-quality content. We are looking forward to helping the RSL Collective and all participants shape and implement the RSL Standard — an important component of the future content ecosystem. It gives us a common language, a shared standard and a path forward that ensures quality is rewarded, access is protected and fairness scales with innovation.”

Matt Sanchez, chief operating officer, Yahoo

Leading internet publishers and technology companies, including Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., Internet Brands, Ziff Davis, Fastly, Quora, O’Reilly Media and Medium, today announced their support for the launch of the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard licensing protocol and the nonprofit RSL Collective rights organization. Through the new RSL Standard, the RSL Collective will provide fair, standardized compensation for publishers and creators, and simple, automated licensing for AI and technology companies.

RSL is an open, decentralized protocol, based on the widely adopted RSS (Really Simple Syndication) standard, that scales to millions of websites and can be applied to any digital content, including web pages, books, videos and datasets.

“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. RSL builds directly on the legacy of RSS, providing the missing licensing layer for the AI-first internet. It ensures that the creators and publishers who fuel AI innovation are not just part of the conversation but fairly compensated for the value they create.”

From robots.txt to RSL: The content licensing infrastructure layer for the AI-first internet

As the web’s economic foundation is being undermined by AI crawlers and agents, the RSL Standard goes beyond the simple yes/no blocking of the robots.txt protocol to define a new licensing infrastructure layer for the web, enabling publishers to add machine-readable licensing and royalty terms to their robots.txt files that specify how AI applications and agents must compensate them for using their content.

RSL supports a range of licensing, usage and royalty models, including free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (publishers get compensated every time an AI application crawls their content), and pay-per-inference (publishers get compensated every time an AI application uses their content to generate a response). Any online publisher can start using the RSL Standard today to define licensing and compensation terms for their content.

The direction and evolution of the RSL Standard is led by the RSL Technical Steering Committee (TSC) with representatives from leading publishing and technology companies, including 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).

The RSL Collective: A unified voice for millions of publishers and creators to negotiate fair compensation from AI companies

Collective licensing bodies like ASCAP and BMI have long enabled music creators to receive fair compensation by pooling rights into a single, indispensable offering. With the RSL Standard as the technology unlock, the internet industry now has the infrastructure layer it needs to build and apply the same collective licensing model to the internet ecosystem — establish fair market prices and strengthen negotiation leverage for all publishers.

The new nonprofit RSL Collective, launching today, provides collective licensing services through the RSL Standard for Internet publishers and creators. Joining the RSL Collective is free and non-exclusive. By adding their voice to the RSL Collective, creators and publishers help strengthen the open web’s collective leverage to secure fair recognition and compensation. To learn more or join the RSL Collective, visit: rslcollective.org.

How RSL works

Key capabilities of RSL include:

• A common, extensible vocabulary that lets online publishers define licensing and compensation terms, including free, attribution, pay-per-crawl and pay-per-inference compensation.
• An open protocol to automate content licensing and create internet-scale licensing ecosystems between content owners and AI companies.
• Creating standardized, public catalogs of licensable content and datasets through RSS and Schema.org metadata.
• An open protocol for encrypting digital assets to securely license nonpublic, proprietary content, including paywalled articles, books, videos and training datasets.
• Support for collective licensing through the nonprofit RSL Collective rights organization or any other RSL-compatible licensing server.

Support for RSL

The RSL Collective and RSL Standard are supported by 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.

Additionally, the following companies support the RSL Standard: Fastly, Quora and ADWEEK.

About the RSL Standard:

The Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard is an open, collaborative initiative dedicated to defining standardized, machine-readable building blocks for expressing content licensing and compensation rules for how content is accessed and processed for Artificial Intelligence (AI) model development, deployment and use. The direction and evolution of the RSL Standard is guided by the RSL Technical Steering Committee (TSC). 

To learn more about the RSL licensing standard or get involved, visit https://rslstand.org.

About the RSL Collective:

The RSL Collective is a nonprofit collective rights organization and technology platform, supported by leading internet companies, with a mission to protect the value of human creativity online by leveraging the RSL Standard to ensure that the millions of online creators and publishers are fairly compensated when AI companies use their work.

The RSL Collective is led by Doug Leeds, former CEO IAC Publishing, Ask.com, and Eckart Walther, former CEO Cardspring, product executive at Uber, Twitter, Yahoo and co-creator of the RSS standard.

To learn more about the RSL Collective or join for free, visit https://rslcollective.org.

Media contact:

Kathryn Kelly
Kelly Communications
kathryn@kellycommunications.org