Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

The attribution legal code says you must attribute:

the name of the Original Author
     (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied,

if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate
      another party or parties for attribution
      in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service
      or by other reasonable means, the name of such party

the title of the Work if supplied

the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that
      Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work


which breaks down to:
Name, if supplied
Affiliate Name, if designated
Title, if supplied
URL, if specified

If it isn't called out, you don't have to attribute it.

Where I get a little fuzzy is when the work itself doesn't
contain this information,  but the work is made available
under someone's account or something that does contain the
information. Personally, I'd attribute all the stuff supplied
indirectly, but I'm not sure if that's legally required.

Say a movie clip is on Flicker, and the only way to get the
info is to go to the person's account, and the account is a
pseudonym, but they point to their website which lists their
real name.

I'm not sure if that's sufficient to enforce attribution or not,
and if enforcable, I'm not sure if the person could require  you
search all the way back to their home page and real name, or
if you could get away with their pseudonym/username and the
URL to the Flicker site.

Personally, I'd recommend everyone embed the information they
want for attribution into the work itself. If attribution is
important, then I think that guarantees you'll get exactly
what you wanted.

It also simplifies things for people who want to use their work,
reducing the overhead they have to go through to meet your license
requirements, and preemptively answers questions like Terry's.

The front page of "Bounty Hunters" says

:This work licensed under the CreativeCommons–Attribution license.
:The following information is provided for attribution purposes:
:Author's Name: Greg London
:Title of Work: Bounty Hunters
:URL: http://www.GregLondon.com/cc/by

And that makes it clear what I want and expect,
and it makes it as easy as it gets for downstream
authors to use my work.

Personally, I'd also try to track down the best attribution
information if it isn't clear what is wanted, but that extra
work may make me decide to not bother with it at all.

Greg



> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> cc-licenses mailing list
> cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
>


-- 
Barbara Bauer makes SFWA's 20 Worst Literary Agencies list
http://www.sfwa.org/beware/twentyworst.html

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