Creative Commons provides tools for people to share their works with “some rights reserved”. Therefore, when reusing a CC-licensed work, either as pure sharing or as a derivative work, it is your legal obligation to include what license is being used, as well as obeying by the license conditions provided by the licensor (content owner/creator).
Finding Licensed Work
Creative Commons’ SEARCH tool interface searches across Google (web and images), Flickr, Blip.tv, Jamendo and Wikimedia commons for Creative-Commons licensed works. You should always verify that the work you are re-using has a Creative Commmons license attached to it. Search.creativecommons.org offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations. Selecting different search options within the result list—particularly Image search for Google and Yahoo—may lead to the inclusion of results which are not Creative Commons licensed.
Additionally, Creative Commons also has a content directory with more than hundreds of organizations and projects powered with Creative Commons licenses.
Attributing Licensed Work
If you are using a work licensed under one of our six core licenses, then unless the licensor has said otherwise the proper way of providing credit when you are making a verbatim use is:
To keep intact any copyright notices for the Work;
Credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki or journal) in the manner they specify;
The title of the Work; and
The URL for the work if provided.
You also need to provide the URL for the Creative Commons license selected with each copy of the work that you make available.
Marking third-party content in your work
If you are a creator who is incorporating other creators’ CC-licensed content in your work, the best practices above also apply to these specific third-party items. Here’s how you may want to consider marking third-party content that is licensed differently.
For more information and resources, visit the Creative Commons Wiki page on Marking.
