"RSL's mission is to stop AI crawlers from scraping publishers' sites without compensation or permission. The idea is that publishers and other digital companies will come together to define, and automate licensing terms for their content. Publishers can add machine-readable terms to their robots.txt files through the RSL protocol, including licensing, usage and royalty terms - rather than just the traditional "allow" or "disallow" language telling AI bots if they can scrape their sites."
"The RSL Collective is working with the CDN company Fastly to allow AI bots to scrape websites if they've agreed to license content. "As USA Today Co. focuses on clear attribution and compensation of our valued content, we are evaluating every opportunity to ensure fair value, not just for the USA Today Network, but for the industry at large as we seek to sustain quality reporting and trusted journalism," Lark-Marie Anton, USA Today Co.'s chief communications officer, said in an email statement."
Over 50 publishers and digital companies now partner with the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Collective to standardize AI content licensing. Participants include Arena Group, BuzzFeed, USA Today Co, Vox Media, People Inc., Ziff Davis, Yahoo, Reddit, Medium and Quora, with partnerships structured as non-exclusive. The RSL protocol enables publishers to add machine-readable licensing, usage and royalty terms to robots.txt files instead of only "allow" or "disallow" directives. Publishers can request pay-per-crawl or pay-per-inference fees and integrate with CDN partners so licensed AI bots can access content. The initiative aims to prevent uncompensated AI scraping and automate licensing and compensation.
Read at Digiday
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