RSS co-creator launches new protocol for AI data licensing

I was surprised to see an Eckart Walther cited as an co-creator of RSS. That was news to me, and I followed the RSS wars since 2000. I thought I knew the names of everyone involved.

Turn's out: he really is. RSS was created by Ramanathan Guha, Dan Libby and Eckart Walther at Netscape first as an RDF Site Summary but only Guha and Libby are named on the original specs. That format then got transformed into a pure XML-based format, then merged with Dave Winer’s format, who then became chief author for the following RSS 0.9x and 2.0 versions. And of course in parallel there were the rivalling RSS 1.0 specs (again RDF based) and the Atom effort.

Should anybody be interested in now obscure histoy: Twobithistory did a longer retrospective of the feed wars:

https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html

And the (slightly disputed) RSS Board, its own fractal in the RSS history, keeps copies of the original specifications:

https://www.rssboard.org/rss-history

Now, a group of technologists and web publishers has launched a system that would enable data licensing at massive scale — provided AI companies take them up on it. Called Real Simple Licensing (RSL), the system is already being backed by major web publishers like Reddit, Quora and Yahoo. The question now is if that momentum will be enough to bring major AI labs to the bargaining table.