New RSL Web Standard and Collective Rights Organization Automate Content Licensing for the AI-First Internet and Enable Fair Compensation for Millions of Publishers and Creators

Reddit, People Inc., Yahoo, Internet Brands, Ziff Davis, Fastly, Quora, O’Reilly Media, and Medium are among the first to support the new Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, available to any website for free today, to define licensing, usage, and compensation terms for AI crawlers and agents.

Leading internet publishers and technology companies, including Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., Internet Brands, Ziff Davis, Fastly, Quora, O’Reilly Media, and Medium,  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.”

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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 its ecosystem—establishing fair market prices and strengthening 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.

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.

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