It’s been a busy (and tragic) week but one of the more interesting things to launch was the Really Simple Licensing standard. I have a lot of scars from the web standards wars, so I’m hesitant to dive back in, but this is from a lot of the early Web 2.0 people, as TechCrunch writes about.
As it happens, James LePage of Automattic has spun up a WordPress plugin for it, so that was fast. Now the thing to figure out is distribution and adoption.
I really like the idea of RSL but I’ve been having issue with the RSL collecting the fees if it’s a standard.
Could for example, WordPress.com implement this, but act as the fee collector / processor.. and just apply any generated revenue directly to our hosting fees etc.
Maybe I’m getting it wrong – but I don’t see the point of: RSL collect fees, take cut -> Pay me, bank / PayPal / whatever takes cut -> I pay WordPress for hosting, payment processors take another cut -> etc.
Lets cuts straight to Automattic\WordPress collects fees, takes processing fees etc., applies rest to my hosting / payout if I’m super lucky.
RSL is just a file with your content’s license, so LLMs crawlers can’t say “i thought i could just use it “, but they can choose to ignore it (if they don’t get caught).
CMS, blogs, etc. can implement that standard generating that file, and see if they want to offer related extra services.
Not quite – it’s more than that – “Standardized tools to manage licensing, track content usage, bill and receive royalties, and audit license compliance on behalf of our members.”
In fact – based on this – I’d say it’s a lot more akin to a union, and that take it out of standards territory.
“Collective Negotiation
Use the collective mandate of our members to negotiate fair royalties and attribution from AI companies.”
It’s all under their “services for publishers and creators” section.
https://rslcollective.org/publishers
We’ve seen this before with paywalls. I think that’s what Brave was doing, and before that Marco Arment had a project — Instapaper I think, and a few others. What matters is what OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, etc offer, if they ever do.
I hope this gains traction and general acceptance, so cool!
Easily create, edit, and manage your RSL (Really Simple Licensing) documents.
https://github.com/onurkanbakirci/rsl-editor