How To Incorporate Creative Commons License Metadata into Your Web Application

The goal of this HowTo is to provide a basic step-by-step guide to the technical concerns when incorporating CC license metadata functionality into your web application. This guide has been generalized from various plans for video, audio, or image sharing sites.

1. License Choice on file upload

• Users should be able to choose which license they want for each file they upload.
• This will allow users to make fine-grain decisions about their works (so that some are CC and some are still All Rights Reserved)

Tools to use:

LicenseChooser.js or Web Services

Example Implementation (Pictures)

2. Default License choice in account settings

• In account settings, users should be able to specify a default license for their work.
  • Ex: A user licenses chooses CC-BY for all of their work and ignore license choice on upload.

Tools to use:

LicenseChooser.js or Web Services

Example Implementation (Pictures)

3. Include license RDFa on content pages

• Part of Creative Commons' package is to include RDFa code that signals to machines how a work is licensed.
• This will allow works to be scraped by search engines and other automatic content discovery services

Tools to use:

RDFa and ccREL

Example Implementation (Pictures)

4. Include "copyable" attribution language with RDFa

• Similar to video embed code but this HTML is for bloggers and other republishers to use to fully attribute a work.

Tools to use:

Web Services, RDFa, and ccREL

Example Implementation (Pictures)