Dan Nessett wrote: (...)
After asking around, one suggestion was to keep the licensing state in the page_props table. This seems very reasonable and I would be interested in comments by this community on the idea. Of course, there has to be a way to get this state set, but it seems likely that could be achieved using an extension triggered when an article is edited.
Seems a good approach.
Since this post is already getting long, let me close by asking whether support for associating licensing information with articles might be useful to a large number of sites. If so, the perhaps it belongs in the core.
Many sites could benefit, but I'd place it into an extension for now. Preferably on our svn. Note that not everything that many people use belongs to core (eg. ParserFunctions).