Why is this a copyright thing?

The word friend dates back to Gaius Plinius Secundus AD 23 – August 25, AD 79.

There are no 2000 year old copyrights.

Seems like a pretty worthless tag to begin with.

How can one safely assume that they are friends?

I see friends, friendship, and friendly. I don't think they're good tags either.

It was probably a copyright because of someone once typing "copyright:friend ship is magic". The extra spaces without any underscores would have made "friend" a copyright by mistake. But I fixed it so friend is a general tag again. And then I cleaned it out because most of the twenty-ish images in there were just mistagged (a lot of them should have been tagged as friends).

For reference, the friends tag is sort of like couple but more platonic. It's used when there's evidentially a close bond between the characters indicated by context, how it was drawn, how they're interacting, etc. In contrast, couple is when it's relationship/dating/sex based; friends is when it's not that but seems to be a more platonic type of a bond. Different types of bonded. A lot of images don't qualify for either because there's not enough reason to think there's a bond there. In fact, the majority of the images on the site just look like a few characters interacting without anything to indicate they're closely bonded in any meaningful way. Judging from the comments here, I'm guessing that friends is one of those tags which some users never use but other users rely on. I know I've seen many comments of people who used it or were looking for what it had. I've also used it myself quite a bit. From what I've seen the friends is used in two opposite uses: some people who find it sappy/sentimental/clichéd/want to avoid it so they use it on blacklists, while other people love to browse it at the end of a long day. It's not easy to find these types of images through other tags though, so for either opposite reason the tag gets used, it's still serving a purpose.

Having said that though, we don't need so many different variations of it:

• friend could be aliased to --> friends, and probably should be.

friendship would normally be aliasable. But it's so common as a mistag when people meant to type friendship_is_magic that the images under it are usually very mixed. So maybe should be invalidated some other way.
friendly is linguistically related in spelling though not really the same thing. However, friendly only means that something 'doesn't appear to be an immediate threat'. I'm not convinced this serves much use as a tag. It's very vague and would probably apply to everything that isn't creepy, angry, etc. Seems like an unremarkable quality, and I can't see how it would be used for searches. So I'm also thinking it should just be invalidated. Thoughts?