Hacker News Reader

Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

These CC Attribution licenses always scare me off. First off, what the heck does this even mean?

    You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author

The author almost never specifies how they want to be attributed. But since they're using an Attribution license they must want to be attributed some how.

So how am I going to attribute an author if I'm using their icons in a mobile app? That seems like quite a bit of extra work.

I don't want to sound unappreciative, this is an awesome project, but I need a "how to use CC attribution art for dummies".

View on HN

It's up to the author to specify. For most wikipedia text, you need to link back to the original article or a copy of the article or include a list of the major authors.

On the other hand, StackExchange is more onerous - they require a link to SX, a link to each author, each author's name, links to each author's profile, and a text blurb indicating that the content is from SO. Oh, and no "nofollow" links, or JS tricks - they want the google juice.

You also need to ensure that derivative work is also CC, if there is a -SA clause (which I think is the case for both wikipedia and SX.

It should all be there in the TOS page.

If they author/site doesn't say, just link back to them, and include a short blurb (i.e. "by <username> at <website>". Really, that's likely to be all they want. If they cared about the legalities, they probably include them in the TOS. Or email them, asking for clarification.

For Wikipedia, apparently someone did their homework: the disclaimer under the edit box says "You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license."

SO's insistence on non-obfuscated links doesn't make much sense to me, though. Users retain copyright to the content they submit to SO, so it's them, not SO, who say which attribution they would like. SO could require some sort of attribution to be sufficient (like Wikipedia does), but users are free to say that they accept any sort of attribution besides that, even one which does not credit SO at all.

They actually have a post about that on their blog:

http://blog.thenounproject.com/post/7310229014/how-to-proper...

"When using a CC Attribution work created by us, please attribute it to The Noun Project and include a link whenever possible." (the post goes into more detail for CC-BY in general as well)

It's really not that hard.

If author does not specify the details, just add a line saying something like: "Icon (photo, music, whatever) credit: John Doe, www.example.com" to your about page.

If you want to help the author a bit more, especially on the web, link to the specific page and provide a description, e.g.: "[Yellow Monkey Icon] (links to the icon page), (c)/by John Doe, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license". This helps with SEO.

If you're making a derivative work, say so.

At least that's what I suggest for my CC-BY works.

This is certainly the sensible way. But with legal contracts it's not enough to be sensible. The author is supposed to specify. The times I've contacted authors to ask about their desired attribution they've never contacted me back (only about half-a-dozen times now).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com