On a related note, Vice.com notes that the website of the author of SOPA, U.S. Representative Lamar Smith, did not properly attribute its use of a CC BY-NC-SA licensed photo (Mist Lifting off Cedars) by Flickr user dj @ oxherder arts, aka DJ Schulte.

Here’s the photo, with attribution (aka how we normally attribute photos on this blog):

Mist Lifting off Cedars / dj @ oxherder arts / CC BY-NC-SA

As anyone who has read the CC license deeds know, all CC licenses require attribution, which is clearly summarized at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0 (and all CC license summaries):

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.

Additionally, the complete license (aka legal code) is linked at the top of all deed summaries. We’re continually trying to help users understand how to properly mark CC-licensed works; to avoid mis- or non-attribution situations like the above, or for more info, see our FAQ and Marking best practices for users of CC-licensed content.

In an earlier blog post, we promised to share some useful “things you may not know” about legal and technical aspects of CC tools, especially as they relate to the release of public sector information.  Publishers of PSI – which may include governments and their agencies, but also others – have a strong desire to receive the credit they deserve through proper attribution, while simultaneously safeguarding their reputations when information is re-used.  They also care about preserving the integrity of the information they provide, so that the original can be differentiated from modified forms, and can be easily located. CC’s legal tools provide sound and tested solutions for each of these needs.

Attribution

Creative Commons tools provide a sophisticated, flexible method for attribution that addresses the needs of those making PSI available (licensors) and those using the information (licensees).  Attribution is a condition of all Creative Commons licenses. This requirement calls for preservation of any copyright notice, attribution (recognition of the licensor as the copyright holder of the work) and the URL (link) to the original work if provided as well as to the CC license. The attribution requirement thus serves the dual purpose of ensuring that the publisher of PSI receives appropriate credit, and that provenance information for published PSI is kept intact.

CC licenses allow governments and others releasing public sector information to define how they want to be attributed, in advance at the point of publication.  For instance, a licensor may request a specific attribution statement separate from or in addition to credit for the individual author or the releasing agency, or request that attribution be made to another person or entity altogether, such as a funder, publisher or journal. Below is an example attribution statement that includes attribution to an author and credit to a funder, though any number of custom statements might be crafted:

“An evaluation of non-motorized traffic accidents from 2000-2010,” by Mary Smith. Funded by the Polish Ministry of Transport. Available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Poland license.

Licensors may also request not to be attributed at all, and can require users to remove the credit otherwise required.  For example, if PSI released under a CC license is aggregated with other content and published in a collection, or if the PSI is itself modified (when a CC license permitting modification is applied), then the licensor may request removal of the credit to which it is otherwise entitled from the collection or the modified work, regardless of the reason.  This removal mechanism enables the publisher to distance itself from re-uses, a feature that may also be used to protect the licensor’s reputation.

CC tools also make it easy for users of PSI to comply with attribution requirements. CC licenses allow for flexibility in the way attribution is implemented depending on the means used by a licensee to re-distribute the information.  There may be different expectations for attribution based on the format in which the PSI is re-used.  For example, providing attribution to the author when re-distributing information via a blog post is different than crediting the author within a video remix.  All CC licenses provide that attribution must be provided in a manner “reasonable to the medium or means” used by the licensee, and for credit to be provided in a “reasonable manner.”  This flexibility facilitates compliance by licensees – minimizing the risk that overly onerous and inflexible attribution requirements are simply disregarded as being too difficult – while at the same ensuring that credit is still provided.

CC’s straightforward yet flexible method of attribution makes it easy for users to “do the right thing.”  Licensees are more likely to use and republish the information and provide proper attribution, just as intended by the publisher, because no fixed or unbending form(at) is dictated. At the same time, institutions releasing PSI consistently receive the credit they are due.

Reputation

Governments and others want to release PSI and allow others to re-use, build upon, and combine the information with other materials in impactful and meaningful ways, yet some may be concerned that their reputation might be tarnished depending on how the information is re-used.  Protecting the reputation of publishers is critical, and CC licenses have several features that help ensure that this high priority need is met.  In addition to the credit removal mechanism mentioned above, CC licenses also contain a “no endorsement, no sponsorship” clause.  This standard feature of all CC licenses prohibits licensees from implicitly or explicitly asserting or implying any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the licensor without express, prior written consent.  Any violation of this clause results in automatic termination of the licensee’s right to use the CC-licensed PSI.

CC licenses help protect reputation in other ways, too.  When PSI is licensed under a CC license that permits modifications (any license without the “NoDerivatives” condition), anyone modifying the information must clearly label or identify that changes have been made.  This marking requirement puts users of the modified work on notice that the original has been modified, helping ensure that modifications are not wrongly associated with the original publisher of the PSI.  This feature, in combination with the requirement that the URL for the original must be provided, properly distances the original publisher of the information from the modifications (whether or not desired) and facilitates comparison of the original with the modified version.  Finally, CC licenses do not grant permission to use anyone’s trademarks or official insignia, nor do the licenses affect other laws that may be used to protect one’s reputation or other rights – those rights are all reserved and may be enforced separately by the publisher of the PSI.

Integrity

Some publishers of PSI may worry that information they release may be changed for the worse, re-used in a way that compromises the integrity of the original, or mixed with information from other sources in a way that compromises the integrity of the original release. CC licenses guard against these worries in several ways. Importantly, when PSI is released under a CC license permitting modification, any modifications that are made do not affect the integrity of the original material because any changes are made to a copy of the released information. The original remains intact and preserved, exactly as released (most typically) on the publisher’s website.  Additionally, the attribution and credit requirements described above require that adaptations provide a link to the URL for the original (if provided), ensuring everyone has access to the authoritative work in its unmodified form for reference and comparison purposes.  These mechanisms, together with the requirement that modified works be clearly marked to alert downstream users that modifications have been made (and the original may be easily be found through the link to its URL), provide a net of safeguards to help preserve the integrity of the original PSI release.

CC tools offer flexible yet legally and technically robust mechanisms for ensuring attribution in the preferred manner of the publisher (when credit is desired).  They also protect publishers’ reputations and alleviate concerns about preserving the integrity of the original information.  These mechanisms work together easily and seamlessly, giving confidence to publishers choosing CC licenses for their PSI.

Open Attribute, “a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work,” launched today with browser add-ons for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The add-ons “query the metadata around a CC-licensed object and produce a properly formatted attribution that users can copy and paste wherever they need to.”

If you use our license chooser and copy and paste the resulting HTML code into your website, then you’re pretty much good to go. Anyone who uses the Open Attribute browser add-on to query your site will automatically receive a formatted HTML or plain text attribution that they can copy and paste to give you the proper credit.

Open Attribute uses CC REL metadata found in the pages to generate the attribution metadata. You might remember that we developed a guide with real examples to make CC REL metadata much easier to implement: CC REL by Example contains example HTML pages, as well as explanations and links to more information. If you’re curious to see how Open Attribute pulls the metadata, the guide includes a specific section on Attributing Reuses.

Open Attribute is a direct result of the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival held last year in Barcelona on Learning, Freedom and the Web. See Molly Kleinman’s post for a more comprehensive run-down of the origins and team behind Open Attribute.

Since we last blogged about CC in Barcelona, we’ve been very productive. Two weeks worth of open events have yielded several talks around open educational resources (OER) search, discovery, and policy at Open Ed, recommendations and tools for greater open content reuse at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, and a 12 month plan for the future of the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).

Open Ed 2010

In addition to an excellent talk by board member Cathy Casserly, CC staff members Nathan Yergler and Timothy Vollmer both gave talks that led to fruitful side conversations that will be helpful going forward. Nathan’s talk on “Search and Discovery: OER’s Open Loop” spurred conversations about one of the underlying issues of OER search, which is, “how do you (software, crawlers) know what’s an OER and what is not?” Timothy Vollmer’s talk on the “iNACOL survey: An inquiry into OER projects, practices, and policy in U.S. K-12 schools” identified how OER is being used in K-12 online education and investigated the existing OER models at the state, district, and school level. The survey revealed the widespread knowledge of OER among the respondents, but also ongoing questions about the funding models and professional development needs to alert other teachers and administrators about the process and benefits of exploring OER. On the whole, survey respondents were optimistic about the potential for OER, wanting to see it implemented for a wide variety of functions, including the development of digital textbooks to replace hard copy texts, as a component in building better assessment mechanisms, to augment learning materials for struggling students, credit recovery, independent study, college prep and tutoring, special education, library tutorials, and to provide opportunities for students to engage in content and classes that the school doesn’t offer.

CC BY by tvol

Mozilla Drumbeat Festival: Learning, Freedom, and the Web

CEO Joi Ito gave a keynote and CC’s International Project Manager (and Drumbeat Festival program co-chair) Michelle Thorne worked closely with Mark Surman and other Mozillans to make this event happen–a huge shout-out to all the Mozilla volunteers! The Peer Learning Lighthouse tent, organized by CC Superhero Delia Browne, Alison Jean Cole (P2PU), and myself, focused specifically on overcoming barriers to reuse of CC licensed content and a future School of Copyright & Creative Commons at P2PU. One of the coolest outcomes of this tent was tech specifications around a CC attribution generator, a browser and platform plugin that would export the metadata around a CC licensed work to produce a formatted attribution. University of Michigan’s Molly Kleinman and our CTO Nathan Yergler, in collaboration with Mozilla, are working to make this tool a reality. Discussions on the School of Copyright & Creative Commons revolved around increasing global and linguistic reach of the Copyright for Educators courses, and also adapting the course for librarians, policymakers, and creators.

P2PU Workshop

All P2PU-produced content is under CC BY-SA. In order to more effectively educate P2PU participants and course organizers, the P2PU community are planning to integrate copyright and CC license education into its orientation process, in addition to emphasizing the P2PU value of openness as part of a “social contract” at the beginning of every course, which will be revised to explicitly call out the license. Additionally, the revamped P2PU platform will introduce values and licensing in the latest stage at the sign-up phase.

CC BY-SA by kiyanwang

Of course licensing was far from the only issue that was talked about. Governance, nonprofit incorporation, sustainability, course formats and content, quality control, research, and more were heavily workshopped, and all outcomes from the workshop are available at the P2PU wiki, under CC BY-SA of course. Immediately after the workshop, the P2PU techsprint, involving volunteer developers and designers, produced the next iteration of the P2PU platform–which you can preview here.

If you’re curious about how this works, try selecting some text from anywhere on our blog and pasting it somewhere. Rich text editors (such as most WYSIWYG HTML editors, or Gmail) will preserve the hyperlink but the text will also show up in standard plain text editors as well.

As a creator and contributor to the commons, you have the right to attribution (all six of our licenses require it), so why not make it easy for your audience to automatically provide it?

Setting up and installing Tracer on your own site is easy, just head over to the site, create an account for your domain, select the CC license you’ve released your work under, and add the javascript tags to the footer of your pages. You’ll then be able to see on your Tracer dashboard precisely which text and images are being copied and pasted from your site, and where they are going.

And don’t worry, the extra markup is just text. Nothing about Tynt’s tool forces reusers to do anything, its merely useful additional information providing proper attribution and license notification.

Erik Möller has posted results of a survey run on the English and German Wikipedias regarding how contributors feel about what constitutes appropriate credit for using Wikipedia content. Raw survey data is available for independent analysis.

Unsurprisingly (at least in hindsight), attribution via linking to the article used was most popular, while not giving credit at all was least popular. Here’s the Condorcet ranking, provided by Robert Rohde:

1) Link to the article must be given.
2) Collective credit (e.g. Wikipedia community).
3) Link to the version history must be given.
4) For online use: link. For other uses: full list of authors.
5) Full list of authors must always be copied.
6) No credit is needed.

Creative Commons had wikis in mind when we added attribution via link in version 2.5 of our licenses in 2005. If there are further changes we can make to address attribution and massively collaborative works, it is surely something we’ll want to look at in a future version of the CC licenses, regardless of Wikipedia migration, as wiki and wiki-like mechanisms will only grow in importance for the creation of free cultural works — though it will be very helpful to have the brainpower and experience of the Wikipedia community guiding such developments.

Correction 2009-03-11: We added attribution by link in version 2.0. The change in 2.5 did have wikis in mind, but was more subtle — allowing the licensor to designate that attribution should go to an entity such as a journal or wiki. Thanks to Anthony for prompting this correction on the Wikimedia Foundation discussion list.

Book, Suzanne Chapman | CC BY-NC-SA

What is your role at the University of Michigan Library? How does the University Library interact with the rest of the University?

I’m the University Library’s copyright specialist. I provide copyright and publishing assistance for faculty, students, researchers, staff, and librarians throughout the University of Michigan, and occasionally to the community at large. I handle questions on both sides of the copyright universe: people come to me as users of copyrighted works and also as creators with concerns about their own rights. At a university just about everybody is both a user and a creator, so I think it’s important to promote a balanced perspective on copyright. A big part of my job is teaching workshops and providing one-on-one consultations about copyright and scholarly publishing basics. I work with librarians all over campus to raise awareness about topics like fair use, Open Access, and author rights. I also support a number of the Library’s activities, including our institutional repository Deep Blue, the Scholarly Publishing Office, and Special Collections exhibits. People always ask if I’m an attorney… I’m not. I’m a librarian by training, and have a background in publishing. A law degree is useful when dealing with copyright, and it’s certainly necessary when you’re providing legal advice, but in many other situations it’s not essential. Copyright is messy and confusing and it makes a lot of people nervous and scared. Approaching these issues as a librarian allows me to explain things in “human readable” language instead of legalese. My goal is to demystify the law and empower students and faculty to advocate for their rights as both users and creators.

As for the role of the Library in the University, I think it remains true, if a bit cliche, that the library is the heart of the university, both physically and intellectually. At the University of Michigan we have a flagship building at the middle of the central campus in Ann Arbor and many smaller libraries located in the hearts of the departments and campuses throughout the University, and we’re also at the heart of scholarly activity and information on campus. The difference now is that so much of the information to which we provide access is online. We still have millions of print books, and our physical spaces remain tremendously important, but more and more our buildings are gathering places for group work, studying, and instruction. This means our interactions with the rest of the University are increasingly distributed. Many scholars use the Library every day without ever entering one of our buildings, and at the same time the information services that the Library offers are expanding. We continue to answer reference questions, but in addition to staffing the reference desk we answer questions via phone, email, and instant message. Librarians teach classic bibliographic instruction and also classes on Google searching, citation management software, PowerPoint, and Photoshop. We have three locations on campus where people can get assistance scanning documents, building websites, and creating posters, and we have facilities dedicated to supporting patrons who use spatial data, numeric data, and statistics. And for the last two and a half years my office has made copyright and publishing support services available. The role of the library in universities has grown as human access to information has grown. We do much more than just keep track of a bunch of old books.

Can you explain the Espresso Book Machines? What kind of impact has on demand printing had in the UM libraries? All the books printed in the machines are public domain – would this sort of system been possible if the works had been All Rights Reserved?

The Espresso Book Machine can produce a perfect-bound paperback book in less than ten minutes. The U-M Library got one last fall. The technology is still very new and there aren’t very many of them, but the premise is that you could distribute book production to point of need, which in many contexts would be cheaper and more convenient than the current system. All you would need is a network connection and a few terabytes of storage somewhere to hold all the digital files. For now, the machine is still a sort of proof of concept. It’s wonderful for the long tail of books, the rare or obscure books that are long out of print and hard to find. The Espresso Book Machine can give these books new life, and give the two or three people to whom these books might actually be important a copy of their very own. The fact that it’s networked is key, because it allows us to print much more than just books digitized from our Library; it means that someone a thousand miles away can print copies of books held by the University of Michigan. We currently print books digitized by the Open Content Alliance, and in the future we imagine printing CC-licensed books as well, provided the license permits it. My understanding is that On Demand Books, the company that produces the Espresso Book Machine, is working out a royalty-payment system so that it will be possible to print books that are still under copyright, but so far at U-M we’re only printing public domain books. Eventually we’d like to partner with people from the University community to experiment with printing new works, things like poetry collections from a writing class, or textbooks.

You can see a video about MLibrary’s Espresso Book Machine here.

You wrote up a great piece on how to on how to use CC licenses and CC licensed works – how important is proper attribution in your line of work? For culture at large?

Attribution is tremendously important in academic research. Without properly cited sources, it is impossible for future scholars to follow the line of thinking that led to a given conclusion. Attribution is the trail of breadcrumbs that gets us back to the beginning. There is something of a plagiarism panic on college campuses, and while I think some of it is overblown, citation and attribution remain some of the first skills we teach undergraduates.

Attribution is also important from the perspective of scholars who are trying to build their careers. Young scholars want credit for their work so they can get tenure-track jobs and eventually tenure. Tenured faculty want credit so they can get more research funding. I see this as one of the selling points for Creative Commons in academic settings. U.S. law doesn’t have the framework of moral rights that exist in the U.K. and elsewhere requiring that an author always be given proper credit for a work even if she has signed away all the other rights. The attribution requirement that is the baseline in all CC licenses provides some reassurance to academic authors who may not expect to profit financially from their work but for whom credit is very important.

How can CC licenses and CC-licensed material help instructional librarians?

CC-licensed material is an incredibly valuable resource for all kinds of instructors. Creative Commons has supported the creation of a wealth of new works that are available for use without permissions or fees, which means that instructors, librarians, and students don’t have to rely on the public domain for materials that they can repurpose without fear or risk of copyright infringement. This is a huge thing. I have a hard time not using superlatives when I talk about what a wonderful resource it is. We can even use the tool we’ve always used – Google – to find Creative Commons-licensed photographs, illustrations, music, video, and educational resources.

I know instructional librarians who use CC-licensed works in a number of ways: many use CC-licensed images to spice up their workshop slideshows, one colleague uses music from ccMixter for instructional videos he posts on YouTube, and a handful use CC-licensed teaching materials as the basis for creating their own classes.

For librarians who write and teach, Creative Commons-licensed resources are a windfall, but there is much more to our work than just our own writing and instruction. Though it’s not usually framed this way, academic librarians spend a lot of time assisting people with the production of scholarship. Everyone knows that librarians help people do the research, but we may also help them with the writing and the teaching, and guide them through the publishing process, too. In those roles, Creative Commons-licensed material is a gift we can give our users. One of the most common copyright questions librarians get is, “Is it okay for me to use this copyrighted thing in this way?” With Creative Commons, we can say, “Well, it might be really hard to clear the rights on that random picture you found on the internet, but look, here are hundreds of pictures of the same thing that you are free to use without asking!” I’ve had consultations with faculty that ended abruptly when I showed them how to search Flickr for licensed images. The faculty member was so thrilled by the realization that she wouldn’t have to spend the next six months tracking down permissions, and so distracted by the discovery of this treasure trove of usable photographs, that all she wanted to do was be left alone to browse.

Most of the people reading this blog already know about the benefits of licensing their work so I won’t go into it too much, but needless to say those benefits apply to librarians as well. Many of the works that librarians create, like bibliographies or technology guides, are useful across many institutions, so CC licenses make a lot of sense for us. Licensing our work is also a great way to connect with colleagues at other institutions and to get our names out there.

How do librarians balance CC licensing with fair use rights?

I’d like to say that librarians as a profession are all staunch defenders of fair use and that we all promote a balanced view of copyright that takes full advantage of all the exceptions and limitations available to us. But unfortunately many librarians have been as terrified by the content industry’s scare tactics as everyone else, and they interpret fair use and other exceptions narrowly and with great caution. As a result, some librarians don’t make all the uses they could of copyrighted material, and the guidance they provide to their patrons is similarly limited. One of the things I love about CC is that it provides content that people can copy and build upon without relying on fair use. If you already have permission, you don’t need to worry about four factor analyses or risk assessments. CC-licensed content is such a valuable resource because people can use it without fear. Still, I always make it a point to explain that CC licenses are permissions that have been granted above and beyond the fair use rights that everyone already has, and that those fair use rights are broader than most people realize.

None of this is to say that fair use isn’t tremendously important to librarians and academics; it is. When patrons come to me with a specific work that they’d like to use, I help them through the process of making a best-guess fair use determination, and I always encourage people to take advantage of their rights as users. If we don’t fight for a robust fair use exception we will lose it.

In October of 2008, the University Library decided to release all their own content under a CC BY-NC license. What was the motivation behind this decision? What kind of outcomes have there been? Have you seen any interesting cases of reuse?

There were few motivating factors behind the decision to use Creative Commons licenses for Library-created content. The biggest was that it aligned well with our overall commitment to openness and access. Part of the Library’s mission is “to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.” We promote open access publishing models, we have a strong history of digitizing public domain works and making them available online, and we partnered with Google to scan all of the books in our collection, even the works under copyright. Adopting a Creative Commons license for our own content – things like study guides, bibliographies, and technology tutorials – seemed like a logical next step. In part we were inspired by the story of Otago Polytechnic University, which was a Featured Commoner a while ago for making all of its open educational resources available under the CC-BY license. We don’t produce as much content, but what we do produce we wanted to make freely available for reuse.

There was also a more practical consideration: we receive permission requests to use Library-produced content with some regularity, and those requests often go to people who have no idea what to do with them. They get bounced around until someone finally just says yes, and these requests can take a lot of time to handle. Creative Commons licenses were made to help reduce transaction costs, and we saw that as a potential benefit for the Library. It turns out that we still sometimes receive permission requests, but now it’s very easy to point the requester to the CC license. It can even be a teaching moment, a chance to introduce a person to Creative Commons for the first time.

We have only had the licenses up for a few months, but I am aware of a couple of instances of reuse so far. There is a liberal arts college that is building a website of copyright and publishing resources based on the U-M Library’s copyright website. I also heard recently about a scholar who is publishing a paper on digital libraries and plans to use screenshots of our digital collections. That’s the kind of use that would probably be considered fair, but publishers sometimes ask authors to clear the permissions anyway. Now she can just point to the CC license instead.

Can you explain the mission of the HathiTrust? What is UM’s invovlement?

HathiTrust is a collaborative trusted repository for digital book and journal content. It was launched by the 12 university libraries that are a part of the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 University of California libraries. At the moment it’s composed primarily of books that were scanned by Google as a part of the Google Digitization Project, but it will also include works digitized by the partner libraries. Even though much of the content in HathiTrust is duplicated in Google Book Search, the models are very different. Google emphasizes access and search, while HathiTrust is dedicated to long-term preservation, stewarding the files through changes in format and hardware. HathiTrust also has an interest in serving scholarly research needs, and developed a system to serve users with print disabilities that provides access to screen-reader-optimized versions of the OCR files, even for works that are still under copyright.

U-M has been the primary developer of the software platform for the repository, much of which was based on existing open source projects. The U-M Library also recently received a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to create a Copyright Review Management System, the result of which will partly support HathiTrust. HathiTrust only provides access to books in the public domain. The Copyright Review Management System is dedicated to reliably identifying books that are in the public domain that were published in the United States from 1923 to 1963. Those works may be in the public domain if certain requirements weren’t met, but it each book has to be researched individually. This grant will help us set up a reliable and collaborative system for identifying books in the public domain so that we can make those books available to the world through the HathiTrust, and share that information with other organizations that are dedicated to improving access.

Is there anything else our readers should know about the University Library? What are your plans for the future?

We have an event coming up that might of interest to your readers in or near Ann Arbor. From March 23rd – 27th we’re having Open Access Week, a series of events promoting and investigating the Open Access movement and its impact on scholarship. Creative Commons licenses play an important part in open access publishing, and I expect we’ll be talking about CC a lot that week. It’s primarily for a local audience, but all events are free and open to the public. A full schedule of events is here.

Molly, Libby Hemphill | CC BY

This is an ongoing issue in the community. No matter how straight forward the instructions for providing attribution to a work are, mistakes will always be made. Most times the mistakes are made not in malice but in a lack of guidance. Luckily, Molly is taking up the task on her blog.

Her examples are easy to understand along with providing various methods of accomplishing the same goal. She even has an “Ideal” example and a “Realistic” example.

From Molly:

I’m taking the material I use in my workshops, mixing it up with CC’s extensive documentation, and posting the results here. If anyone has ideas for topics they’d like me to cover, let me know.

Here’s hoping she continues on this project of producing easy to understand examples of how to use Creative Commons licenses effectively and correctly.