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ZDNET's key takeaways
Media companies announced a new web protocol: RSL.
RSL aims to put publishers back in the driver's seat.
The RSL Collective will attempt to set pricing for content.
AI companies are capturing as much content as possible from websites while also extracting information. Now, several heavyweight publishers and tech companies -- Reddit, Yahoo, People, O'Reilly Media, Medium, and Ziff Davis (ZDNET's parent company) -- have developed a response: the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard.
You can think of RSL as Really Simple Syndication's (RSS) younger, tougher brother. While RSS is about syndication, getting your words, stories, and videos out onto the wider web, RSL says: "If you're an AI crawler gobbling up my content, you don't just get to eat for free anymore."
Also: AI's not 'reasoning' at all - how this team debunked the industry hype
The idea behind RSL is brutally simple. Instead of the old robots.txt file -- which only said, "yes, you can crawl me," or "no, you can't," and which AI companies often ignore -- publishers can now add something new: machine-readable licensing terms.
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