Web Integration
This is a page describing "everything" a media hosting site could do to integrate CC and CC-related features.
Also install and see the ccHost software which implements many of these wishes as best practices.
Contents
Choose license
Default License
There should be a default license to govern all content that is project-wide. For websites, this involves adding a license with proper marking somewhere on the site and using this as the default for all other selections when applicable (feeds, default for user-generated-content, etc). Sites like Technorati have licensed all content on their site under a specific license and note this at the bottom of their website on every page.
Individual Licenses
After a default license is applied on a project, then 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 Syndication.
User Preference
Users should also be given the preference to set their default license and/or set the license per media item. And, all technologies should adapt to this user selection as with Syndication. For example, Flickr allows users to select a license for uploaded photos as time of upload, but also have default license which is selected to reduce the amount of work a user must undertake for this task.
User Interface
Default
The default approach for marking a licensed piece of content is demonstrated on our license page.
Dropdown
A drop-down list for selecting licenses seems to be quite effective. See how this is done on Flickr and others sites.
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.
Publish License on the Web
Link to License
The best way to show a license use is to link to the full URL back to the CC license. See the license page for how this is done.
Use RDFa
RDFa is RDF in attributes and CC current recommendation for exhibiting semantic relationships for search engines and other machines to understand content relationships. See examples of this on http://labs.creativecommons.org
Search
Commercial Use
Search by "Allows Commerical Use" A great example of this is on the http://www.google.com/advanced_search and http://search.yahoo.com/search/options
Remix
Search by "Allows Remix" See the examples in #Commercial Use Also, a great example is http://spinxpress.com/getmedia
Specific License
Search by specific licenses by name, such as Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany. A great example of this is on http://spinxpress.com/getmedia
Use OpenSearch
We recommend the usage of the OpenSearch standard for empowering searching of content in an open manner with proper licensing.
Browse
CC Portal (Channel) on Site
Create a channel on your project for all the CC licensed content. A great example is http://www.getdemocracy.com/ player.
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.
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.
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
