Crooked Timber has a post today on copyright and attribution that cites Creative Commons:

In short, the informal economy of academic attribution is much more like the kind of alternative economy that, say, Creative Commons
is trying to create than it is like the copyright industry. Academics
are usually happy when others rip, remix or even parody their work – as
long as the remix artists acknowledge them by name. Similarly, the Creative Commons licenses now include a requirement for attribution as standard
(it used to be optional, but 97-98% of Creative Commons users wanted it
in their licenses, so that the CC crowd decided that it was easier to
make it the default). The requirement that people not plagiarize (i.e.
that they not use others’ work without attribution) presents no
problems whatsoever for ‘free culture.’