Content creation and delivery companies have introduced a digital licensing mechanism in an effort to compensate media makers when AI companies use their work.

The Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard is intended to provide websites with a programmatic way to present web crawlers with licensing terms, and to gate site access based on license compliance, which may require payment.

RSL attempts to improve upon robots.txt, a voluntary way for websites to declare how bots should interact with site content. Crawlers frequently ignore robots.txt, and some disguise themselves to avoid being blocked. So RSL offers a compliance mechanism that requires bots to present an authorization header as part of the network negotiation process.

"With RSL, websites can enforce stricter control over their

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