RSLReally Simple Licensing

The open content licensing standard
for the AI-first Internet

RSL Guide

RSL Reference

RSL API

Quickstart

Featured Supporters

Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media

Today, as AI systems absorb and repurpose that same content without permission or compensation, the rules need to evolve. RSL builds directly on the legacy of RSS, providing the missing licensing layer for the AI-first Internet.

Neil Vogel, CEO People Inc.

Creators are essential to the success of the AI era and must be fairly compensated. RSL moves the industry forward—evolving from simply blocking unauthorized crawlers, to setting our licensing terms, for all AI use cases, at global web scale.

Protect your content rights in the AI era

RSL is an open standard that lets publishers define machine-readable licensing terms for their content, including attribution, pay per crawl, and pay per inference compensation.

Paid license exampleCC attribution license example

xml

<rsl xmlns="https://rslstandard.org/rsl">
  <content url="/">
    <license>
      <permits type="usage">train-ai</permits>
      <payment type="subscription">
        <!-- Using content for AI training requires custom license -->
        <custom>https://your-website.com/contact-form.html</custom>
      </payment>
    </license>
  </content>
</rsl>

xml

<rsl xmlns="https://rslstandard.org/rsl">
  <content url="/">
    <license>
      <permits type="usage">all</permits>
      <payment type="attribution">
        <!-- Content available under CC attribution license -->
        <standard>https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</standard>
      </payment>
    </license>
  </content>
</rsl>

Learn more about adding RSL to: robots.txt, web pages, HTTP, media files, RSS feeds

Automate licensing your content

Enable AI and other technology companies to license content at internet scale through the RSL Open Licensing Protocol (OLP), eliminating manual negotiations and integrations.

RSL License Server example

xml

<rsl xmlns="https://rslstandard.org/rsl">
  <!-- Using content requires obtaining license from an OLP server -->
  <content url="/videos" server="https://example-server.org/api">
    <license>
      ...
    </license>
  </content>
</rsl>

Set up your own license server, or join the nonprofit RSL Collective to manage access, licensing, and compensation for your content

Reclaim lost revenue from AI companies

Collaborate with other content owners in negotiating collective licensing terms and building sustainable licensing ecosystems between content owners and AI companies.

Paid collective license exampleAttribution collective license example

xml

<rsl xmlns="https://rslstandard.org/rsl">
  <content url="/" server="https://rslcollective.org/api">
    <license>
      <payment type="inference">
        <!-- Using content requires obtaining RSL Collective license -->
        <standard>https://rslcollective.org/license</standard>
      </payment>
    </license>
  </content>
</rsl>

xml

<rsl xmlns="https://rslstandard.org/rsl">
  <content url="/" server="https://rslcollective.org/api">
    <license>
      <payment type="attribution">
        <!-- Using content requires obtaining RSL Collective license -->
        <standard>https://rslcollective.org/license</standard>
      </payment>
    </license>
  </content>
</rsl>

Join the nonprofit RSL Collective to receive royalties and attribution every time AI companies use your content

Join for Free

Securely license nonpublic content including books, videos, and datasets

Replace ad-hoc data integrations and passwords with an open, standards-based solution that encrypts and protects your proprietary content during transit.

Encrypted book license example

xml

<rsl xmlns="https://rslstandard.org/rsl">
  <!-- Decrypting EPUB content requires obtaining a license key -->
  <content url="/books/book1.epub.aes" encrypted="true"
           server="https://example-server.org/api">
    <license>
       ...
    </license>
  </content>
</rsl>

Learn more: Encrypted Media Standard, Key managment API

Create standardized catalogs of your licensable digital assets

RSL integrates with RSS and Schema.org to enable publishers to create standards-based, machine-readable catalogs of their licensable content and datasets.

RSS catalog example

xml

<rss xmlns:rsl="https://rslstandard.org/rsl" version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Datasets - UCI Machine Learning Repository</title>
    <link>https://archive.ics.uci.edu/datasets</link>
    <item> 
      <title>Iris dataset</title> 
      <link>https://archive.ics.uci.edu/dataset/53/iris</link>
      <rsl:content url="https://archive.ics.uci.edu/public/53/iris.zip">
        <rsl:license>
          <rsl:payment type="free"/>
        </rsl:license>
      </rsl:content>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Learn more: Adding RSL to RSS feeds, Adding RSL to Schema.org

Join the RSL community

Join the GitHub discussion group to receive updates about RSL and share your support for RSL on Social Media:

Simon Wistow, Co-founder of Fastly

"The launch of the RSL Standard is a timely and necessary response to the shifting economics of the web. By making it easy for publishers to define and enforce licensing terms, RSL lays the foundation for a healthy content ecosystem."

Ricky Arai-Lopez, Head of Product, Quora

"Quora is proud to support the RSL Standard, which helps publishers set terms that work for them, serving as an important step towards a sustainable path for both industries to create mutual value and thrive together."