AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and others are facing lawsuits for allegedly scraping data without permission, with Anthropic recently settling its copyright lawsuit with book authors for $1.5 billion. In the wake of data scraping by these AI companies, Reddit, Quora, Yahoo, and other digital publishers announced Really Simple Licensing (RSL), an open, decentralised protocol for AI companies to scrape content. Developed by the non-profit RSL Collective, the system is built on the widely popular Really Simple Syndication standard, also known as RSS. Like RSS, it can easily handle digital content like web pages, books, datasets and videos across millions of websites. It also works at scale, which means one can use automated tools and web crawlers to process the licensing terms without any manual input. However, the main challenge with RSL is that no AI company has agreed to its licensing terms. The collective's co-founders - Doug Leeds and Eckart Walther say that their new licensing protocol has everything AI companies need to scrape data for AI training without the risk of lawsuits. "We need to have machine-readable licensing agreements for the internet. That's really what RSL solves", Walther said in a statement to TechCrunch. In the last few years, several groups like the Dataset Providers Alliance have tried and pushed for transparent data collection and usage practices, but this is the first time a group has tried to develop a system that could work in real life. As of now, several web publishers like Yahoo, Reddit, Medium, Mashable, CNET, Quora and WebMD have joined RSL, but it remains to be seen if the standard will be adopted by tech giants. Currently, there are more than a dozen lawsuits pending in the US courts against AI companies like Google and Midjourney, alleging them of scraping and using data for training AI models without permission. Google's AI Overview has also been under scrutiny as it displays AI-generated summaries of information above search results. Because of this, many publishers say they recorded a significant loss in traffic from Google Search.
