After Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement, the AI industry is under growing pressure to address how it sources training data. With roughly 40 more lawsuits looming, including one targeting Midjourney for generating Superman images, the sector risks being buried under copyright disputes.
A new initiative called Real Simple Licensing (RSL) is aiming to change that. Backed by major publishers like Reddit, Quora, and Yahoo, RSL provides a standardized framework for licensing web content at scale.
The system has both a technical and legal component. On the technical side, publishers can set licensing terms within their “robots.txt” files, making it easy for AI companies to identify which content requires special permissions. On the legal side, RSL has established the RSL Collective, a central body that negotiates and collects royalties, much like ASCAP does for musicians.
“Machine-readable licensing agreements for the internet are what we need,” said RSL co-founder Eckart Walther, who also co-created the RSS standard.
Early members of the collective include Reddit, Medium, O’Reilly Media, Ziff Davis, Internet Brands, The Daily Beast, and Yahoo, while others like Quora and Adweek are supporting the standard without formally joining. Importantly, RSL doesn’t prevent publishers from striking individual deals; instead, it offers smaller outlets a way to participate in licensing without going solo.
Challenges remain, particularly around tracking how AI models use specific data once training occurs. Unlike streaming music, where plays are easy to log, AI training data is harder to trace and measure for royalties. Still, RSL’s founders argue the system doesn’t need to be perfect, just effective enough to ensure compensation.
The ultimate test will be adoption. While AI companies like Google and OpenAI have already paid for certain datasets, much of the web has historically been treated as free to scrape. Convincing labs to pay for what they once accessed at no cost may be RSL’s steepest climb.
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But with industry leaders, including Sundar Pichai, openly calling for a structured licensing system, RSL’s creators believe the timing is right. “They’ve said this needs to exist,” co-founder Doug Leeds noted. “Now we’re giving them the system.”
