Enter the Real Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, a new tech-based licensing solution for the "AI-first internet," as RSL puts it. It's backed by Reddit, Yahoo!, Ziff Davis (PCMag's parent company), People, Medium, WikiHow, Quora, Adweek, and more.
The RSL Standard would allow websites and individual creators to set terms for using their content—from written work to videos, web pages, images, and datasets—before ChatGPT, Claude, Google, or any other AI system surfaces it in chatbot responses. Anyone can sign up for free by joining the RSL Collective, a website where content creators can set their terms and, ideally, see the money flow in.
"Today, there's really no way to say for a website to say, 'Hey, I want Google AI Overviews off [for my content] unless you can compensate me for that lost revenue, which is not unreasonable," says Eckart Walther, co-founder of the RSL Standard and one of the original creators of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which RSL is based on. Doug Leeds, former CEO of IAC Publishing and Ask.com, is the other co-founder.
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