What is RSL?

Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is an evolution of the early ideas behind the widely adopted RSS standard, which provided a machine-readable framework for publishers to syndicate content to third-party clients and crawlers in exchange for traffic.

The RSL standard extends and generalizes these concepts to include explicit licensing terms, enabling publishers to define machine-readable compensation and usage conditions for crawling and processing their content. The direction and evolution of RSL are led by the RSL Technical Steering Committee, in close collaboration with internet publishers, technology companies, industry associations, and other stakeholders.

Use Cases

RSL is an open, XML-based document format for defining machine-readable licensing terms for digital assets, including websites, web pages, books, videos, images, and proprietary datasets. It enables publishers, authors, and application developers to:

• Define licensing and compensation terms, including free, pay-per-crawl, and pay-per-inference, to use digital assets for AI training, web search, and other applications

• Create public, standardized catalogs and licensing terms for digital assets

• Enable clients to automate licensing and paying for legal access to digital assets

• Define and implement standardized licensing and royalty agreements