The ability to tag posts / media with a license

[afontenot]

Pitch

Each post (or optionally, just media posts) would have the option to set a license. My preference would be for a dropdown similar to the language selector that only allows selecting a range of free culture and Creative Commons licenses (probably including the non-commercial one), to encourage their use.

Motivation

The biggest motivation is feature parity with Pixelfed and PeerTube. An ideal implementation would support sharing license information for content across the Fediverse, so that tagged licenses from PixelFed are correctly displayed when federated on Mastodon timelines, and vice versa.

There was previously a lot of effort put into a PR to get this feature in Mastodon, and I believe it had the necessary level of support to be added if the PR hadn't stalled: #5820 I don't believe there was ever an issue backing that PR, so I'm creating this one.

More generally, in most jurisdictions, user content already has a copyright status, and that status is usually "all rights reserved". Some (e.g. in the above PR) had concerns about reifying the notion of copyright in the Mastodon interface itself, but my read on the situation is that this actually just recognizes the underlying legal reality and more importantly gives users the opportunity to change that reality for their posts - e.g. by licensing their media or writing as free cultural works. Currently this is an uphill battle on Mastodon, but it doesn't have to be. On some instances, the admin could even set a default license of CC-BY or CC-0.

(Side note: I'm surprised that the Mastodon terms of service don't seem to contain the standard "perpetual, worldwide, royalty free" license grant to display, store, perform, etc., any content that the user uploads. This might be a legal necessity in certain jurisdictions, e.g. affecting instances and their admins in the United States.)

[afontenot]

Incidentally, I know there's a lot of action on this issue tracker right now, so I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to create any pressure to have this implemented right away. I just know I'll forget about it if I don't make the issue while I'm thinking about it.

[ClearlyClaire]

Related: #9528 #5239

[spaceottercode]

partly related to #18127

[skopf]

I am as well surprised by your side note and opened a separate issue #23201 for this aspect.

The problem comes with federation. Content provided to a mastodon instance is replicated to other instances and then displayed on their websites. This requires the content to be available under a permissive license.
Even CC-BY-NC could cause issues for commercial instances like mastodon.social.

[bkil]

Related #10123