Creative Commons License
Convener: Evan Prodromou (@evanprodromou@socialwebfoundation.org)
Participants who chose to record their names here:
- William Maggos (@wjmaggos@liberal.city)
- Courtney Rosenthal (@courtney@pdx.social)
- Gilles Dutilh (@DePemig@social.coop)
- Aditya Singh (@adixingh@hachyderm.io)
- Anca Mosoiu (@anca@mastodon.xyz)
- Ryan Barrett (https://snarfed.org)
Notes
Overview of Creative Commons Licenses: https://creativecommons.org
CC licenses don’t have an “All Righs Reserved” version
Links:
2023 reqt’s FEP: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/c118/fep-c118.md
Discussion: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-c118-content-licensing-support/2903
Evan’s 2026 FEP: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/6757/fep-6757.md
Bridgy Fed feature request: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/2735
Pixelfed now includes the ability to add a CC-License to your account.
CC was created in the early 2000’s based on the concerns people had at that time about content use. In 2026, there are other concerns about content reuse (such as for having their content included as training data for an LLM), which are not indicated by CC-Licensing.
Courtney mentions “Really Simple Licensing”: https://rslstandard.org/ - this provides a way to make assertions about content blocks on your website including for LLM scraping.
What’s the expectation that people should develop about this? If I license my content CC-Attribution or CC-Share-Alike, would I expect it not to be included in a publication that had “all rights reserved”? What about on feeds in general?
- Something like FediWall should look at the content licenses before publishing.
Look at CC in the music industry. People in the industry are using CC, but the Fedimusic community still expects direct consent for reuse. This slows down the process for reuse. Artists are sometimes concerned about how their art is re-used, for example by right-wing organizations.
Licensing and consent/control are tradeoffs! The more control you retain, the more difficult it is for other people to redistribute, reuse, and interoperate with your content. Which is ok! But it is friction that makes the network work together less.
Defaults also matter! Very few people ever change defaults. On a given platform, is the default license open and permissive, or restrictive? Makes a big difference.