Creative Commons Integration With Your Website

• This is a page describing "everything" a web-based (media) hosting site could do to integrate CC and CC-related features. There are quick, easy ways that you can share your website content by publishing it under a Creative Commons license.

Best Practices

Flickr.com is a great example of a website that incorporates various Creative Commons licensing feature. Websites new and old are recommended to explore the Flickr site to see how they've done it.

Imitation of Flickr's CC integration is a recommended first pass:

• http://flickr.com/account/prefs/license/ -- user license selection (must be logged in to see)
• http://flickr.com/creativecommons -- CC browse
• http://flickr.com/search/advanced/ -- CC search

Easy Two Step Process

Review Conditions; Select License

Visit the Creative Commons license page at http://creativecommons.org/license/. Answer two simple questions and set the jurisdiction for your license. Click "Select a License," which outputs the appropriate code that you'll be able to add to your site that signals which CC license you've chosen. For example, users who choose the Creative Commons Attribution License receive the following code snippet:

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/">
<img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/us/88x31.png" />
</a>
<br />This work is licensed under a 
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License</a>.

Publish License on the Web

The code displays an icon as well as a link to the full license deed hosted at the Creative Commons site. This is the appropriate way to mark your CC-licensed content. More information about best marking practices is located at the Marking page.

Licensing Widget

The CC Javascript Widget (JsWidget) provides an easy way to integrate the license choices provided in the default case above into your site. JsWidget provides an additional, lightweight method for integrating license selection into web applications. The widget is used by TypePad as well as in WpLicense, which uses JsWidget to provide a license selector for WordPress.

Default Licensing

We recommend that you apply a default license to govern all the content on your website. This involves adding a license with proper marking somewhere on your site and using this as the default for all other selections (feeds, default for user-generated-content, etc). For example, Creative Commons has licensed all content on its site under a specific license (CC-BY) and displays this at the bottom of every page on the website:

Individual Licenses

After a default license is applied on a website, consider making an atomic approach to licensing where individual pieces of media have licenses applied both with physical marking and in technology, such as in RSS Syndication.

User Preference

On user-generated content sites like Flickr, users should be given the preference to set their default license and/or set the license for each media item. All technologies should adapt to this user selection as with the aforementioned RSS Syndication. For example, in the Flickr account preferences users can change the license of an individual photo after uploading (their default is "All Rights Reserved") as well as select a different license (such as one of the Creative Commons licenses) as the default. This helps reduce the amount of work a user must undertake if they wish to publish their photos under a CC license.

Jurisdiction licenses

The best practice is to give users a choice of jurisdiction rather than defaulting to "unported" (or, as appropriate for the site, default to a relevant jurisdiction license). JsWidget can be configured to support each of these options.

Search

We recommend that you facilitate search based on license properties, typically:

• Any CC license
• CC licenses that allow remix
• CC licenses that allow commercial use

Examples include engines built into http://search.creativecommons.org

Ideally these search parameters may be set on the URL. See CC search integration for several examples.

Browse

CC Portal (Channel) on Site

Create a channel on your project for all the CC licensed content. Good examples include http://flickr.com/creativecommons and http://jamendo.com/creativecommons/

Limit Browsing to CC Licensed Content

This could be based upon tag, internal marking of licensing, and or any way a project sees fit to limit browsing possibly in connection with #Search.

Feeds

CC annotations

There should be a license for the entire feed as default (if your site uses default licensing) and then a per-item license. If you only have default license for your site, it is recommended to add the license to each item in the feed. See more about how to do this technically on our Syndication page.

Feed URLs Facilitating CC Restrictions

Similar to #Browse, provide a way to limit content in feeds based upon CC Restrictions similar to how its done in #Search.

Embed WebStatement

NOTE: While it is important to embed metadata, it is a much higher priority to #Publish License on the Web and to mark what license you are using using the media you have licensed.

RDFa

RDFa is RDF in attributes current CC recommendation for exhibiting semantic relationships for search engines and other machines to understand content relationships. See examples of this on http://labs.creativecommons.org

• Similarly, machine-readable attribution should be included, see examples on ccLabs.

ID3

For MP3s, it is recommended to use the standard ID3 fields at the present time for embedding information about CC licenses for the content. This is the one exception to using XMP, and it is recommended to search file-types that use ID3 for XMP as well.

XMP

We recommend that all use XMP for metadata embedding of CC licenses. This is de-facto metadata standard now with support from Adobe, Microsoft, and more.

Publish Client-Verifiable ID on Web

See Marking_Works_Technical#Web_Statement.

Re-use tracking with link:search

Reuse external to your repository should link back to the source work hosted by you. You can provide a service to your users by gathering reuse links via link: queries (e.g., via Yahoo! Site Explorer API), Technorati, and others.

API

There should be a licensing API that might be part of a restful API that allows querying of the site, and outputting of possibly Syndication with proper license attribution, etc. There are other ways an API could specify license as well.

Sample Pool API

The Sample Pool API facilitates searching for content to reuse across repositories and notification upon reuse. See ccHost for a sample implementation.

CC+ Integration

Use rel="cc:morePermissions" to denote links allowing a user to do more than the CC public license permits, e.g., purchase commercial rights, warranty, purchase media, tickets, patronage... See ccLabs for information and examples and a license generator that will create a more permissions link. See this page for more on the CC+ initiative.

Education

While Creative Commons provides the necessary education about how Creative Commons licensing, technology and standards works, there are some key ways to explain Creative Commons on your media hosting site in relationship to your own project goals. Great examples of explaining Creative Commons should be linked to http://creativecommons.org/learnmore with emphasis on our explanatory videos. Also, http://makeinternettv.org/ does a great job of explaining generically how Creative Commons licensing works for media hosting sites. Specifically see their licensing page: http://makeinternettv.org/license/cc.php

Adopters

If you support 100% of the media hosting wish list relevant to your site, you get major kudos and your name here.

• Put your project here!

Future Adopters

If you are hoping to adopt this, put your name down here to be contacted and worked with by Jon Phillips

• Sylvain ZIMMER / www.jamendo.com
• put your name here!

See Also

• How to technically mark works in various ways