Recommended practices for attribution

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:

You also need to provide the URL for the Creative Commons license selected with each copy of the work that you make available.

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 using CC-licensed content in your own work, the best practices above also apply to the 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:

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

• For images & documents:
  • Official CC Markers
  • User Submitted Markers
• For audio:
  • CC Podcast Plugs
• For video:
  • Official CC Bumpers
  • User Submitted Bumpers

More Technical

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

External Guides and Fact Sheets

• Creative Commons Australia's Attributing Creative Commons Material (pdf) (created for the Pooling Ideas competition)
• Molly Kleinman's excellent, easy to read article CC HowTo #1: How to Attribute a Creative Commons licensed work - includes illustrative examples.
• How to Attribute a Creative Commons Licensed Work article on wikiHow, based on Molly Kleinman's article.