Really Simple Licensing (RSL)

Live

A machine-readable licensing schema for clearly signaling reuse permissions and conditions (including payment or use restriction).

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Website
rslstandard.org
Latest tracked evidence
Dec 10, 2025Technical standards released
Last checked
Jul 15, 2026
Profile updated
Jul 15, 2026
Primary approach
Formal license
Practical force
Legal termsPractical effect depends on applicable law, rights ownership, notice, and contract formation.
Also uses
Preference signal
Pipeline
Collect / Train / Retrieve
Status rationale
Publicly available or deployable in the latest catalog review.

Enforcement

Legal or license terms. States permissions, restrictions, or conditions for AI-related reuse.

Practical effect depends on applicable law, rights ownership, notice, and contract formation.

Catalog status describes public availability, not legal validity, adoption, or proven effectiveness.

What it is

RSL provides a structured way to express licensing terms in machine-readable form for clients that choose to support it. The standard combines rights expression, implementation guidance, and ecosystem backing from publishers and infrastructure providers.

Really Simple Licensing (RSL) sets out formal reuse terms for web content across the collection, training, and retrieval stages. It also incorporates preference signaling. The terms can state permissions and restrictions, but their legal effect depends on applicable law, ownership, notice, and agreement formation. Public materials describe a currently available initiative; the newest dated source in this profile is “Technical standards released” (December 10, 2025). These details describe the published mechanism and evidence, not a finding about legal validity, adoption, or effectiveness.

Limitations

The reported organization and page figures describe endorsement and the reach represented by supporters, not verified RSL deployment. RSL expresses terms and rights reservations but does not itself block access, compel crawler compliance, or establish enforceability in every jurisdiction.

Evidence trail

Adoption signals

Examples

Site-wide RSL fileSource

The RSL 1.0 spec includes a compact XML example for prohibiting AI use across a site.

<rsl xmlns="https://rslstandard.org/rsl">
  <content url="/">
    <license>
      <prohibits type="usage">ai-all</prohibits>
    </license>
  </content>
</rsl>
Schema.org license pointerSource

RSL's Schema.org guide shows how structured metadata on a page can point to an RSL license file.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Book",
  "name": "Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Herman Melville"
  },
  "license": "https://gutenberg.org/ebooks-rsl-license.xml"
}