Reddit, Quora, Yahoo Team Up to Take On AI Data Scraping With New Licensing Protocol

Reddit, Quora, Yahoo, Medium, CNET, and others have launched the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) protocol, an open, decentralised system designed to let AI companies legally scrape and use online content for training models.

The non-profit RSL Collective developed Really Simple Licensing (RSL) using the popular RSS standard. Like RSS, RSL handles digital content—web pages, books, datasets, and videos—across millions of sites. Built for scale, it allows automated tools and web crawlers to process licensing terms efficiently, eliminating the need for manual intervention.

The move comes amid rising lawsuits against AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, accused of scraping content without permission. Anthropic recently settled a copyright suit with book authors for $1.5 billion, highlighting the stakes involved. Interestingly, Reddit has also filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing it of using Reddit’s content to train its models without a proper licensing agreement.

RSL aims to offer machine-readable licensing agreements that allow AI firms to train models without facing legal risk. “We need to have machine-readable licensing agreements for the internet. That’s really what RSL solves,” Eckart Walther,  RSL co-founder, told the TechCrunch.

While several major publishers have signed on, no AI companies have officially adopted the standard yet.

The protocol’s success could define how generative AI interacts with online content, addressing longstanding concerns over copyright, transparency, and fair compensation.