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.

Below are 4 areas where integration can occur in your web application. While each web application may not need each of the 4 integrations, Creative Commons recommends that as many as practical are implemented.

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 content they create on the site.
  • Ex: A user licenses chooses CC-BY for all of their work.
• This can be combined with License Choice on File Upload to allow users to have the default license be, for example, CC:BY and in special cases some others be CC:BY-SA, or even All Rights Reserved.

Tools to use:

LicenseChooser.js or Web Services

Example Implementation (Pictures)

3. Include license RDFa on content pages

• Including RDFa code signals to machines (search engines, browsers, etc) exactly how a specific work is licensed.
• This allows works to be scraped by search engines and other automatic content discovery services with associated license metadata.

Tools to use:

RDFa and ccREL

Example Implementation (Pictures)

4. Include "copyable" attribution language with RDFa

• This is similar to practice to video embed code from services such as YouTUBE. However, this HTML is for bloggers and other republishers easily attribute a work fully and correctly.

Tools to use:

Web Services, RDFa, and ccREL

Example Implementation (Pictures)