The University of Michigan Library Copyright Office provides help with copyright questions for University of Michigan faculty, staff and students. Please email copyright@umich.edu with questions or visit our website for more information.
The information presented here is intended for informational purposes and should not be construed as legal advice. If you have specific legal questions pertaining to the University of Michigan, please contact the Office of the General Counsel.
If you require legal advice in your personal capacity, the lawyer referral services operated by the Washtenaw County Bar Association and the State Bar of Michigan may be helpful to you.
All Creative Commons licenses require attribution. However, the licenses are deliberately flexible about the requirements for that attribution. The Best Practices for Attribution are outlined on the Creative Commons wiki.
That page, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, provides the following guidelines for attribution in specific media:
Best practices for attribution apply as reasonable to the medium you're working with. For media such as offline materials, video, audio, and images, consider:
- Publishing a web page with attribution information. For example, on a webpage featuring your audio recording, provide a credit list of material you used that adheres to best practices above. Doing so allows not only your material, but the materials you attribute, to be found by search engines and other web discovery tools. If possible within the medium, make the Author, Source, and License links the user can follow.
- Example: This video features the song "Desaprendere (Treatment)" by fourstones, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
- Mentioning the credits within the media itself. For example, crediting videos can be a simple list of the materials used with their associated licenses in a screen at the end of a video. For audio, it can be a verbal recitation of credits at the end of the recording.
- Video example 1: "Science Commons" by Jesse Dylan - see attribution starting at 1:52
- Video example 2: "Video Editing and Shot Techniques: Study of jump cuts, match cuts and cutaways " video by New Media Rights - see attribution starting at 3:21
- Audio example: "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" by Cory Doctorow read aloud. Mastered by John Taylor Williams - listen to attribution starting at 17:08