Adding Licenses

There's two ways you can add licenses to your stuff. Directly on the file when you upload it to Arweave, and on the tokens when you create the metadata for each rarity. Each comes with their own unique characteristics. One is involving a specific upload of a file, and the other is involving a collection of files, and copies of itself.

You can add a license to an Arweave upload with tags. This is applied directly to the file. The most common licenses to add are a Creative Commons license (CC) or a Universal Data License (UDL).

You can read the UDL document here. In short, a UDL is an allegedly upcoming feature of Arweave that is supposed to be programmable licenses. A UDL is an important tool to go along with encryption unlocking more creative possibilities with your data.

A programmable license will be in the file itself, not the token. That means each file in a piece of thicc metadata could have it's own license on the file, as well as the metadata file itself, before ever reaching a license on the token that is minted of the file. Confusing right?

You can do cool things with Arweave tags because you can search files with tags. Tags are nice and simple and you don't need to understand all that other stuff to understand tags are simple and useful.

You can learn more about data licensing here.

Query On Chain Data

Tags are searchable with a GraphQL query. You can do a test query here to see for yourself. https://arweave-search.goldsky.com/graphql

https://arweave-search.goldsky.com/graphqlarweave-search.goldsky.com

To use licenses on Arweave uploads, just upload a file at ar://listen, and when you're about to upload, look for the licenses button, and apply a license to your file.

To use licenses on your tokens, get a lawyer and figure it out! Someone's gotta figure it out, you can be one of the first! The idea is the same, you would put a link to a larger file in the "license" field of the metadata which would go to a larger document with all the details of the license provided similar to the UDL tag. Except for your tokens you would have your own custom license, rather than a standardized one.