{"id":185026,"date":"2025-12-10T15:29:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T15:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/185026\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T15:29:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T15:29:13","slug":"rsl-1-0-has-arrived-allowing-publishers-to-ask-ai-companies-pay-to-scrape-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/185026\/","title":{"rendered":"RSL 1.0 has arrived, allowing publishers to ask AI companies pay to scrape content"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. Really Simple Licensing 1.0 \u2014 or RSL for short \u2014 gives publishers the ability to dictate licensing and compensation rules to the web crawlers that visit their sites.<\/p>\n

The RSL Collective announced the standard in September<\/a> with backing from Yahoo, Ziff Davis, and O\u2019Reilly Media. It\u2019s an expansion of the robots.txt file<\/a>, which outlines the parts of a website a web crawler can access. Though RSL alone can\u2019t block AI scrapers that don\u2019t pay for a license, the web infrastructure providers that support the standard can \u2014 a list that now includes Cloudflare and Akamai, in addition to Fastly.<\/p>\n

RSL\u2019s 1.0 release lets publishers block their content from AI-powered search features, like Google\u2019s AI Mode, while maintaining a presence in traditional search results. Currently, Google doesn\u2019t give websites an individual option to opt out of AI-powered features without booting them out of traditional search<\/a>, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cRSL provides exactly that missing layer,\u201d RSL Collective cofounders Doug Leeds and Eckart Walther say in an emailed statement to The Verge. \u201cUsing RSL, Google can respect a publisher\u2019s preferences at the use case level, which means a publisher can stay fully available in traditional search, while opting out of AI training, grounding, or generative answers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Google is currently facing an investigation from the European Commission<\/a>, which is looking into whether the company has violated antitrust policies by using web publishers\u2019 content in AI search features \u201cwithout offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content.\u201d<\/p>\n

The RSL Collective says more than 1,500 media organizations and brands now support RSL. In addition to Reddit, Quora, WikiHow, Stack Overflow, and Medium, publishers like The Associated Press, Vox Media (The Verge\u2019s parent company), The Guardian, Slate, BuzzFeed, and Men\u2019s Journal publisher Arena Group have also endorsed the standard.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith this release, and the support for it across the internet ecosystem, RSL 1.0 becomes the expected and trusted way to communicate how content may be used in AI systems, giving those signals real weight in both practice and legal interpretation,\u201d Leeds says.<\/p>\n

The RSL Collective also worked with the Creative Commons to add a new \u201ccontribution\u201d payment option for nonprofit organizations and individuals behind the webpages, code repositories, and datasets that make up \u201cthe shared pool of freely available knowledge and creative work on the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An open licensing standard that aims to make AI companies pay for the content they vacuum up across…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,43,216,80,514],"class_list":["post-185026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}