Best Practices for Attribution | Hacker News Reader

Best Practices for Attribution

wiki.creativecommons.org

70 pointsangelaguilera16 comments

Not terribly helpful. The issue I run into constantly with attribution is that the place I want to use a work does not have room for attribution. If you use a texture in a game for example, you can't just slap the authors name on it. If you put in the credits, nobody knows what texture it's referring too. If you make a list of filenames that links them to the author, it can get easily lost whenever somebody renames a file or reorganizes the directory structure. Some file format allow metadata, but not all and even that is sometimes lost when things get converted or updated. If you do derivative work it gets even more complicated: You make a screenshot of the game, who do you credit now? There might be hundreds of textures on display.

What I miss is a library for Creative Commons work where everything can be registered and content-id-hashed so it is easy to find, even without attribution on the work itself. A set of command line tools to verify that all your data files have proper licensing would be extremely helpful as well. It would also make a nice resource to just browse Creative Commons works instead of having them scattered all over the Web. And it could allow back-linking, so you could see all the places where a given work is used.

Do you need to state where it was used or just that you used it?

> You may satisfy the conditions in (1) and (2) above in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means and context in which the Licensed Material is used. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy some or all of the conditions by retaining a copyright notice, or by providing a URI or hyperlink associated with the Licensed Material, if the copyright notice or webpage includes some or all of the required information.

> There is no one right way; just make sure your attribution is reasonable and suited to the medium you're working with. That being said, you still have to include attribution requirements somehow, even if it's just a link to an About page that has that info.

This suggests "[Texture Name](http://foobar.com/texture.png) by Foo Bar / CC0" in a CREDITS.md should be enough? Just make sure the CREDITS.md (or a rendered html version?) is in the install dir for the game

> Do you need to state where it was used or just that you used it?

If I don't state where it is used, that might work for me, but not for the next guy that comes along and wants to reuse a texture from my game in their own.

This is not just a theoretical concern, some Linux distributions like Debian can be pretty picky when it comes to copyright, so having a clear record of the copyright of every single file would be really helpful. A plain text file is ok if it is properly maintained, but it's also easy to simply lose some files in the process, as it is all done manually. Tools to automate that process that can be integrated into the CI would be very welcome.

My dream would be that tools like Gimp and Krita would be able to automatically keep track of the copyright of the images you copy&paste into them, as that would not just track the copyright of the original images, but also all the remixes that you produce out of them.

> If I don't state where it is used, that might work for me, but not for the next guy that comes along and wants to reuse a texture from my game in their own.

I think it's generous that you want to do this, and nothing prevents you from creating a document that breaks down where and how attributed resources are used, but attribution — per Wikipedia, "acknowledgment as credit to the copyright holder or author of a work" — doesn't require that.

While you could argue it's true with attributions in general (how many people make a note of the photo credit on a typical photograph), I think the point is that an attribution buried in an obscure credits file may satisfy the letter of the attribution requirement but is only actually meaningful in edge cases where someone really wants to track the creator down.

And to another point a couple of people have made, one of the big bugbears with crediting media generally is that the attributions are disconnected from the media in general (absent watermarks) so even if you're careful in your presentation, the person reusing some of your material may not be.

> This work, "90fied", is a derivative of "Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by tvol, used under CC BY. "90fied" is licensed under CC BY by [Your name here].

So how long does this get as we keep making derivatives? For an open source project, where there is a seperate license file, it is okay to have it go on forever, but I can understand why you don't want 100s of lines of license information inside your news story.

> One condition of all CC licenses is attribution.

There's probably a distinction that I'm not aware of but this is not true for CC0 (as stated also in the FAQ for CC0 on this same website).

They seem to draw a line between their licenses and CC0, which they regard more as a "public domain dedication tool". Truth is, you usually can't really throw something in the public domain even if you want to : CC0 is supposed to be a way to get as close as possible. Being in the public domain means your work doesn't need a license, because there is no right to license. They seem to get rid of that word for that reason (it's still a license though obviously).

The "ideal attribution" links to the author via some Flickr URL that will not work twenty years from now?

Yagoddabekidding.

How about, First name, initials, last name, city, country, year of birth.

Also in the case the license was changed to be more restrictive, which gives a headache on how to prove that the use before the license was changed is permitted if the license information was not captured (manually or by archive sites) at first use.

[1] gave a good discussion about whether it is possible to revoke CC license. It doesn't seem likely, but if it does, then it will lead to the license paradox for creators and users alike.

[1] https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2022/05/11/q-can-you-rev...

I've always wondered how too do this for code that requires it.

Creative Commons recommends against licensing software with their licenses: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

They recommend a software-specific license instead, as those licenses handle code distribution requirements much more clearly.

I meant open source software licenses that requires attribution.

As an example, this is how Apple does it for iCloud:

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/acknowledgements-mmbb...

Most project just use the Git history along with LICENSE.txt file in the top level directory. The Git history is the most accurate record of who did what on a project. Some project keep a list of authors at the top of the file, but that get outdated pretty quickly if you aren't really pedantic about it. It also fails to record exactly what part of the file they worked on.

If you use external libraries, leave them in their own directory with their own license files, or at the very least leave them in their own files. So it's clear that they aren't part of the project and covered under their own terms.

If you start copy&pasting code snippets, it gets complicated, as now you might be mixing licenses, which might not even be compatible with each other.

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