Cheryl Colan, a videoblogger and adjunct faculty member at Phoenix College and Scottsdale Community College in Arizona who teaches digital storytelling, multimedia and podcasting, raised an interesting question on the Spinflow list a couple of days ago.
This is the thing that bothers me about the Creative Commons Attribution license. Using it does not specifically mean that someone is supposed to link to you when they use your work. The license actually states: "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor."
But most authors don’t seem to specify how they want to be attributed – I always look to see if I can find this info and it is rarely there. So how are we supposed to know how the author wants to be attributed?
It’s a good point. The vast majority of people who use Creative Commons licenses don’t specify how they should be attributed. So, in theory, one could just credit the person by name, or link to the videoblog post where the video appears, or link directly to the video itself. I ran into this last night when republishing to my Flickr page some CC-licensed photos, shot by others, that I admire.
I asked Mia Garlick (picture above originally appeared on Flickr), the general counsel of Creative Commons, who sits on Ourmedia’s Board of Directors, about this. Here’s what she said:
Actually, your colleague is quoting from the Commons Deed, not the actual
license. The license actually states:"You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or (ii) if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g. a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution in Licensor’s copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; the title of the Work if supplied; to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative Work"
As you can see from this, the license does require a person to
include link to you if the linked page includes information about
the copyright or licensing status. So if you had your vlog and next
to it was a CC logo, then the person would have to link to it if the
vlogger specified that.
This is an interesting — and generally overlooked — point about CC licenses. You can indeed specify how others credit you when they repurpose your work. I noticed that photographer Scott Beale has been doing this at his Flickr pages, for example.
This photo is licensed under a Creative Commons license. If you use this photo, please list the photo credit as "Scott Beale / Laughing Squid" and link the credit to laughingsquid.com.
Mia goes on to say:
You can specify attribution. ie. This video is licensed to the public under the terms of the CC BY license [link]. Please attribute [my name] and link to [this page] when using the video consistent with this license.
If the author doesn’t specify how he or she wants to be attributed, then I think you need to act reasonably — if they have a name on their blog or a URL or a Flickr account name, then use that.
For a video, you should have the CC license info and attribution & link request in both the page where the video originally appears and in the closing credits of the video as well. Maximize notice so people have to comply and can’t say they didn’t know.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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