Recommended practices for attribution

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When reusing a CC-licensed work, either as pure sharing or as a derivative work, it is your legal obligation to include what license is being used, as well as obeying by the license conditions provided by the licensor (content owner/creator). From our FAQ:

All current CC licenses require that you attribute the original author(s). If the copyright holder has not specified any particular way to attribute them, this does not mean that you do not have to give attribution. It simply means that you will have to give attribution to the best of your ability with the information you do have. Generally speaking, this implies five things:

  1. If the work itself contains any copyright notices placed there by the copyright holder, you must leave those notices intact, or reproduce them in a way that is reasonable to the medium in which you are re-publishing the work.
  2. Cite the author's name, screen name, user identification, etc. If you are publishing on the Internet, it is nice to link that name to the person's profile page, if such a page exists.
  3. Cite the work's title or name, if such a thing exists. If you are publishing on the Internet, it is nice to link the name or title directly to the original work.
  4. Cite the specific CC license the work is under. If you are publishing on the Internet, it is nice if the license citation links to the license on the CC website.
  5. If you are making a derivative work or adaptation, in addition to the above, you need to identify that your work is a derivative work i.e., “This is a Finnish translation of the [original work] by [author].” or “Screenplay based on [original work] by [author].”

In the case where a copyright holder does choose to specify the manner of attribution, in addition to the requirement of leaving intact existing copyright notices, they are only able to require certain things. Namely:

  1. They may require that you attribute the work to a certain name, pseudonym or even an organization of some sort.
  2. They may require you to associate/provide a certain URL (web address) for the work.

If you are interested to see what an actual license ("legalcode") has to say about attribution, you can use the CC Attribution 3.0 Unported license as an example. Please note that this is only an example, and you should always read the appropriate section of the specific license in question...usually, but perhaps not always, section 4(b) or 4(c): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode.

Example

"My Awesome Photo," © 2009 Greg Grossmeier, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

If you are making a derivative use of a Work licensed under one of our six core licenses, in addition to the above you need a credit identifying the use of the Work in the derivative, ie. “This is a Finnish translation of the [original work] by [author]” or “Screenplay based on [original work] by [author].”

Marking third-party content in your work

If you are a creator who is incorporating other creators' CC-licensed content in your work, the best practices above also apply to these specific third-party items. Here's how you may want to consider marking third-party content that is licensed differently.

Example

Except otherwise noted, this blog is © 2009 Greg Grossmeier, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. The photo X is © 2009 Jane Park, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

Is your attribution good enough?

Ask yourself whether an interested viewer/reader/listener or other user could discover who gets credit (attribution) and that they have freedoms with respect to the content (notice). If they can, great, if not, consider whether you're making a good faith effort to use the licensed work according to its terms.

If in doubt, you can try asking the original publisher. They may have already provided attribution guidelines, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content


Crediting in Video

Adding the appropriate credit information to you videos could be as simple as a list of the works used at the end with their associated license. Eg:

This video features the following songs:

“Desaprendere (Treatment)” by fourstones, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

“Some Other Song” by fourstones, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

If possible it is desirable to make the title, author, and license a link the viewer can follow.

Crediting in Text

A similar format to the Video example above would be sufficient with the added ability to create links for text available online.

Crediting in Audio

If available online provide a "credit list" of material used and follow the above Text guidelines.

Crediting in Images

If available online provide a "credit list" of material used and follow the above Text guidelines.

Download Markers

More Technical

We also have a document about marking works that is more technical.

External Guides and Fact Sheets

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