An open licensing standard that aims to make AI companies pay for the content they vacuum up across the web is now an official specification. Really Simple Licensing 1.0 – or RSL for short – gives publishers the ability to dictate licensing and compensation rules to the web crawlers that visit their sites.
The RSL Collective announced the standard in September with backing from Yahoo, Ziff Davis, and O’Reilly Media. It’s an expansion of the robots.txt file, which outlines the parts of a website a web crawler can access. Though RSL alone can’t block AI scrapers that don’t pay for a license, the web infrastructure providers that support the s …
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