Authors: Sam Williams [email protected], Abhav Kedia [email protected]
This standard outlines a mechanism for arbitrarily tagging any transaction on the permaweb with the license under which it is published. The standard focuses on simplicity and ease of use in order to encourage broad adoption across the permaweb ecosystem.
The goal of the Arweave ecosystem is to create a permanent, collective commons of all valuable knowledge and history, available to all people at any time. Just like the original web, by its open nature this ecosystem encourages wide reuse and copying of data. On the traditional web, this has led to a broad corpus of widely shared information that lacks associated licensing data.
By making simple use of the tagging system exposed by Arweave transactions and data entries we can avoid a repeat of this situation, and instead build a web where it is common practice to communicate the license of any piece of data. Due to the inseparable nature of Arweave tags from their associated data, the licensing data of all complying transactions will be atomically communicated to uses -- it is impossible to communicate a link to the data, without also transmitting its licensing information. Due to the nature of Arweave's tagging system, this is achieved without any mandatory or noticeable effect on user experience (when the data is rendered in browsers, etc).
The license tagging format is composed of a single additional tag on any transaction on the Arweave network, as well as two additional transaction formats for defining license types.
In order to publish the data of a transaction under a given transaction format, simply add the following tags:
| Tag Name | Optional? | Tag Value |
|---|---|---|
| License | False | TXID of License Definition |
| Title | True | The title of the work |
| Creator | True | The name/identifier of the creator(s) of the work |
| Source | True | A link to the source where the material was obtained, if applicable |
In order to assert that a previously uploaded transaction has a given license, provide the following tags:
| Tag Name | Optional? | Tag Value |
|---|---|---|
| App-Name | False | "License-Assertion" |
| Original | False | TXID of original upload |
| License | False | TXID of updated License Definition |
In order to define a license or related legal tool (such as CC0), submit a transaction with the following tags:
| Tag Name | Optional? | Tag Value |
|---|---|---|
| App-Name | True | "License-Definition" |
| Logo | True | TXID of License Logo |
| Short-Name | True | A short (max 64 characters) 'ticker' with which to refer to the license |
| Content-Type | True | The MIME type of the contained file, describing the license |
The body of the transaction must contain the legal text of the license being defined.
License Logo transactions should be defined as follows:
| Tag Name | Optional? | Tag Value |
|---|---|---|
| Content-Type | False | The MIME type of the contained file |
The body of the transaction must contain the visual representation of the license's logo.