Publishers have been weathering a monetization crisis as AI encroaches on their original content. Automated licensing has become something of a lifeline. Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is an open, decentralized protocol from nonprofit rights organization RSL Collective, which is making it available free to websites that can use it to set licensing, usage and compensation terms for AI crawlers and agents. Based on the scalable Really Simple Syndication (RSS) framework, it works for digital content from web pages to books and videos, helping to thwart unauthorized scraping. Reddit, People, Yahoo and Ziff Davis are among those who have signed up.

Internet Brands, Fastly, Quora, O’Reilly Media and Medium are also among those that are supporting the new format on launch.

“Through the new RSL Standard, the RSL Collective will provide fair, standardized compensation for publishers and creators, and simple, automated licensing for AI and technology companies,” according to the RSL Collective announcement.

“Although enforcement is an open question, it can’t hurt that some heavy hitters back it,” writes Engadget, describing what sounds like an honor system for publicly available content. “RSL adds licensing terms to the robots.txt protocol, the simple file that provides instructions for web crawlers.”

In addition to creating standardized, public catalogs of licensable content and datasets, RSL provides an encryption protocol for nonpublic, proprietary content including paywalled articles, books, videos and training datasets.

“RSL supports a range of licensing, usage, and royalty models, including free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (publishers get compensated every time an AI application crawls their content), and pay-per-inference (publishers get compensated every time an AI application uses their content to generate a response),” the announcement explains.

The RSL Collective has looked to music licensing bodies including ASCAP and BMI for inspiration. Just like those trade organizations “help music creators receive fair compensation by pooling rights into a single, indispensable offering,” the RSL Standard becomes the tech that “brings the collective licensing model to the Internet ecosystem,” establishing market prices and strengthening negotiation leverage for publishers, the group says.

TechCrunch points out that “some publishers already have licensing deals — most notably Reddit, which receives an estimated $60 million a year from Google for use of its training data.” But using the RSL standard doesn’t prevent companies from independently negotiating their own terms.

“But for publishers too small to draw their own deals, RSL’s collective terms are likely to be the only option,” TechCrunch notes.