Source : The Verge
SUNNYVALE, November 12, 2026 – Yahoo has become the first official licensee of a collective system designed to make artificial intelligence companies pay for scraping news and other web content, The Verge reported on November 12, describing the arrangement as a shift from one-off deals towards a common licence.
According to The Verge, several companies last year backed a licensing standard, originally known as RSL, that would require AI firms to pay for scraped content through a collective licence rather than by negotiating separately with each publisher. That effort now operates as the Internet Licensing Collective, or ILC. Yahoo, which was among the backers of the standard, is the first organisation to sign on as a formal licensee.
The report does not, in the account published so far, give a price, a start date for payments, or a list of the AI companies that will be asked to buy the licence. Those details are not invented here. What can be said, on The Verge’s reporting, is that a collective model now has its first official licensee, and that the licensee is one of the names that helped to design the standard in the first place.
The idea behind the collective is straightforward, even if the commercial terms are still thin in public. Instead of a patchwork of lawsuits, blocked crawlers and individual contracts, a common licence would set terms on which AI developers could legally copy and train on participating sites, with money flowing back through the collective. Publishers that do not join would remain outside that bargain. Yahoo’s decision to be first does not bind any other newsroom, search company or platform, but it gives the ILC a flagship name and a practical test.
Whether large model developers will buy the licence, ignore it, or negotiate around it is the next question, and it is not answered by Thursday’s report. Some AI firms already strike direct deals with individual publishers; others have faced legal claims over unpaid scraping. A collective licence is an attempt to sit between those two paths. How widely the licence is taken up, and on what terms, has not yet been set out in public. The Verge reported that Yahoo is also one of the backers of the system now called the Internet Licensing Collective, after earlier support for the related RSL licensing standard.
The Verge’s story also sat alongside continuing coverage of the Nvidia leadership change, which Life News Agency has already reported and which is not repeated here. The Yahoo-ILC announcement is a separate, narrower piece of news: the first signature on a long-promised pay-to-scrape collective, from a company that helped to write the rules. Yahoo’s existing businesses in search, mail and news make it an unusual first mover: it is both a large publisher of content and a technology company that uses automated systems to organise the web. Until the fees, the participants and the first payments are published, that first official signature is the fact that matters.
Source : The Verge.
Source : The Verge
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