Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

When I download a CC-By or CC-By-SA image from Flickr (or
Wikipedia, but it's less often a problem there), I need to get
correct attribution in order to comply.

However, users are primarily identified by a Flickr username,
which may be regarded as a pseudonym (or not).  It's not usually
too difficult to "unmask" the person by following links to profile
and then blog or website.

However, the question is, should I?

I know that *I* would prefer to have photos credited to my
real name, but then I usually use my real name (or abbreviations
of it) as my username on forums, so I may not be too much like
"ten safe frogs" or "Kaptain Kobold".

Given a choice, which should I normally use?

Clearly, I could contact each author about an issue like this,
but ISTM that that defeats the purpose of CC licensing in the
first place.

My current policy is to dig up real names if I can find one
2-3 links deep, but otherwise assume that the username is
an intentional pseudonym, and credit that (along with the fact
that it's a Flickr username).

Is that reasonable?  Or should I always use the usernames?

I'm using these in a commercial online publication and they
may also appear in print, so there's some degree of formality,
which is why I don't want to be shoddy about attribution.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com