Attribution and Licensing
Attribution and Licensing
What is attribution?
Attribution is giving credit--either claiming it for yourself or to others for their creation and/or contribution to the work.
Why is attribution important?
- It is important to claim credit for authorship/contribution to a work because it helps others who see/read/use it know where the work came from and who is responsible for it.
- It is important to credit others as authors/contributors for the same reasons above. People want to know where the information came from!
How do I attribute a work?
[First Name] [Last Name] [Year] [License -- see below for options] should work well enough in most cases!
What is a license?
A license is a way of telling the world how you want the work to be distributed once it is made publicly available.
Why is a license important?
You may want people to share your lecture video over the Internet, but not to change it in any way (CC-BY-ND, for example). Or maybe you made an instructional video and you would like others to have full permission to remix and redistribute (CC-BY-SA license, for example). Perhaps you made some cool software and you want to empower the users with their freedoms as individuals (General Public License or "GPL", for example). These intentions need to be made explicit to those who receive the work from you. Also, publishing the license along with the publication of your work is critically important since many, many people may access your work after publication. The choice is yours!
Important Links:
Recommended for literary works and media: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Recommended for software and software-related works: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html
Example of License (as well as the license for this work):
Devin Ulibarri 2016. This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA)[1].