[cc-community] Help - Guidance on how to apply CC...

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Fri Jun 23 09:45:44 EDT 2006


> We are working over our web site which contains a large number of
> downloadable documents - things like case studies, white papers,
> presentations etc.  We are updating much of this material (Our
> documents are issued in pdf format) and would like it to be issued
> under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0
> England & Wales Licence.
>
> So far so good... but now the questions begin.
>
> First, presumably we have to mark our documents with the cc details -
> but we have been unable to find on the cc web site any guidance about
> what information you put on the text document itself to indicate the
> license terms.  We know from talking to those who use our materials

You can indicate the license where you indicate the copyright notice.

Copyright 2006 John Smith

This work is licensed under CreativeCommons-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives.

you might also want to include the CC thumbnail icon, such as this:
http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.png

and perhaps a plaintext URL to the license itself

either the "human readable" version
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/

or the "legal code" version
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/legalcode

That should do it.

As an alternative, you could put either of those licenses
on a separate page on your own website, and then include
URL's to the license at your site.

http://www.myurl.com/cc_by_nc_nd

or something like that. The advantage of that is that
you can require that URL as part of your attribution
clause, if you'd like to do that.

I use that approach on some of my works and
they contain a URL to my website like this:
http://www.greglondon.com/cc/by/


You could also include either the human readable or legal code
versions of the license in the document itself. It isn't
required, but it is another option. If you want people to
understand the licence, and if paper copies are going to
be the standard medium, and readers can't simply "click"
on a URL to read the license, this may help them.

It isn't required that you do that, though, and may
not make sense if you have a one-page document with
two extra pages of license information.


> that they are regularly printed out and then passed on as printed
> documents - so this tagging is important.  What is the 'correct' (or
> commonly used) form for marking a document?  How do we get around the
> lack of links back to the underlying cc license - is it OK to put in
> a URL, or do we have to somehow paste the whole text into the document?

You could put a URL to CC's website,
or you could put a URL to your website,
to the page that explains the license of the work.
Your URL could then be part of the attribution
requirement, meaning people would have to
maintain that URL.

> Second, I think I have worked out how to add meta data to the pdf to
> indicate the copyright status (looks like we have to do this manually
> as the XMP template is not functional in Adobe CS2 or Acrobat Pro
> 7).  But not sure if this is all we need to do - do we have to add cc
> license data to the web pages that hold these documents?  If so, do
> we do it for the site, the page, or the document?  If for site or
> page, where do we find out what we are supposed to put?

What I did is have one page on my website
that is specific to each CC licene I'm using.
Then I state the license requirements and
list all the works that are licensed under
that particular license.

This is my page for CC-BY-NC and lists two
works under that license. As I add works to
CC-BY-NC, I add it to that page.

http://www.greglondon.com/cc/nc/

> Third, we are hoping to use the Joomla CMS system to support our web
> site - does anyone know if Joomla plays nicely with CC?

Don't know Joomla. Someone else will have to answer this.

Greg
-- 
Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair IP laws
http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/


More information about the cc-community mailing list