Reddit, Yahoo, Medium and more are adopting a new licensing standard to get compensated for AI scraping

A new open standard called Really Simple Licensing (RSL) has been launched to allow web publishers to set the terms for AI companies to use their content. The standard adds licensing options such as free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl, and pay-per-inference to the robots.txt protocol. The RSL Collective, a new managing nonprofit, will oversee the implementation of the standard. Major companies like Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and others have signed on to the initiative. The goal is to establish fair market prices and strengthen negotiation leverage for publishers, as AI companies have been known to ignore robots.txt instructions in the past. While the enforceability of the standard is yet to be determined, the RSL Collective believes its terms will be legally enforceable. The group is also partnering with cloud company Fastly to act as a gatekeeper for the standard. The initiative aims to provide a scalable way for AI firms to license web-wide content and only pay for the content they actually use.