New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Does the web need a `license` tag?

Ask HN: Does the web need a `license` tag?
2 by DarkWiiPlayer | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Okay, it doesn't have to be a tag, nor be called license. The real, somewhat longer question would be: Do HTML and similar technologies need a mechanism to encode licensing / copyright information in a uniform, machine-readable way? This could take the shape of a tag in the header of a document, an attribute that can be used with any or just a few tags, etc. The web has shifted from people hosting their own content on a website or blog, with a copyright notice in the footer, to submitting larger platforms, be it imgur and similar, social media, or sites that focus more heavily on text as their content, even including hacker news itself. How should a crawler know, if it may or may not take some random text from a website and display it somewhere else? How can it know, who to credit, or whether to credit someone at all? Searching google hasn't brought up any way to encode any of this in HTML, maybe I'm missing something? If there really isn't any such mechanism, should there be one? What should it look like?

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