You have chosen a CC license for your work. Now how do you go about letting the world know? Here are some examples of how to mark your work with the CC license. Note: If you want to know how to attribute other creators' CC licensed materials, go here.
You can easily add a CC license notice to your website by visiting the CC license chooser. At the chooser, simply answer a few questions, fill in the fields you need, and receive an already formatted HTML code.
At this point, all you have to do is:
1. Copy and paste the HTML code into your webpage or website.
2. Edit the descriptive text to suit your needs.
This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License</a>.
Except where otherwise noted, this website is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License</a>.
This is the CC license notice at the bottom of this website. The CC BY license notice shows up on every page of creativecommons.org. This is a good example because:
If you visit Parker's blog, you will see this notice. Parker filled out a few fields in the CC license chooser, which spit out an html code. He copied and pasted the html code into his website, editing the descriptive text to his needs. This is a really good example because:
For documents that are meant to be shared offline, use a title and/or copyright page to include the copyright notice and CC license information. You can obtain suggested text using the license chooser.
In the 'Help others attribute you!' box, select 'Offline' in the drop-down menu for 'License mark'. Instead of html, you will receive the following text which you can edit as needed: "This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/." You can also download the corresponding CC license icon at our downloads page.
Example
The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) added this CC license notice to their copyright page in the report entitled, Survey on Governments’ Open Educational Resources (OER) Policies. This is a good example because:
If you link to the document on a web page, make sure that the license information is clearly displayed next to the file, with all the recommended information below.
If you want to get technical and attempt embedding metadata within documents, see the CC-OpenOfficeOrg Addin for OpenOffice or the Microsoft Office add-ins for Microsoft Office 2003/XP, Office 2007/2010/2013.
This photo was taken during CC's 10th birthday party in San Francisco by CC staff member tvol. This is a good example because:
It is also easy to publish your image on an image sharing platform that has built-in CC licensing, such as Flickr, 500px, or Wikimedia Commons.
Note: We don't recommend adding a watermark or visual marker directly on an image, as it can detract from the original and prevent the reuse you want to allow with the CC license. Instead, make sure that the license information is clearly visible underneath (or otherwise next to) the image.
This slide appears at the end of Jane Park's presentation called "Using the CC BY license, Workshop for 2013 OPEN Kick-off" at Slideshare. This is a good example because:
If you link to or embed the presentation on a web page, make sure that the license information is clearly displayed next to the file, with all the recommended information below.
This is a CC video bumper, which you can add to your video if you have room for a 2-5 second copyright frame. Here are some pre-made CC_video_bumpers and some newly updated bumpers (as of Feb. 2019).
You can edit these bumpers or create your own still with more information. Just make sure that such a still contains all the information recommended below.
Once you've added a copyright notice within your video, we recommend uploading your video to one of these video-sharing platforms that have built-in CC licensing. These platforms take care of the machine-readability for you. You can also add author and license info to any "about" field at these sites. After you've uploaded the videos, you can share the video on your own website or blog using the platform's "embed" feature.
If you link to or embed the video on a web page, make sure that the license information is clearly displayed next to the file, with all the recommended information below. For example, this blog post does a good job of displaying the CC license information about the video outside of its medium.
If you want to get technical, we have a document about marking materials so that they are machine-readable.
CC podcast introduction by Cory Doctorow
This is a sample CC audio bumper which you can add at the beginning of an audio file to orally tell users of the CC license. Feel free to use intro bumpers developed by various Internet celebrities. You can also create your own, which can include more information as recommended below.
For audio, we recommend uploading your file to one of the music sharing platformsorcommunities that support CC licensing. These platforms take care of the machine-readability for you. You can also add author and license info to any "about" field at these sites.
If you link to the file on a web page, make sure that the license information is clearly displayed next to the file, with all the recommended information below.
If you want to get technical, Use your favorite audio player to add in the information. See Embedded_Metadata. You can also add ID3 tags to a common audio file type, such as the MP3, or browse other file types.
This is a CC license notice for a snippet of metadata that is part of the India Biodiversity Portal dataset. All the info is displayed once you click on the "i" to "Show details." This is a good example because:
This is the CC license notice for the image to the right of the dataset which in this case is governed by different terms. This is a good example because:
A good rule of thumb is to use the acronym ALM, which stands for Author, License, Machine-readability.
Author - Who should the user attribute?
License - How can the material be used?
Machine-readability - Can machines read it?
Lastly, Is there anything else the user should know about the material?
One way to increase visibility and access to your work is to share it with an existing community on a content-sharing platform. Many platforms support machine-automated CC licensing, making it easy for you to indicate the license along with other information, such as who to attribute. In addition, these platforms may offer the ability to filter or search content by CC license, which increases the chances that your work may be discovered. Search engines, such as Google or Yahoo!, also index CC-licensed works from these platforms.
Take a look at how to license your work on a few of these platforms, like Vimeo and Soundcloud, at Publish.
If your favorite platform does not enable CC licensing, the best thing to do is to add in the license information manually as you would on your own site. There is usually a description or other free form field where you can enter info about the work. You might also consider encouraging your platform or community to enable CC licensing. If the demand is great, they just might listen.
If you have decided to dedicate your work to the public domain using CC0, you can use the CC0 waiver tool just like you use the CC license chooser. Simply fill in the fields at the form, go through the the necessary steps of reading and understanding what rights you are giving up with CC0, and receive the already formatted html code at the end, as show below.
Then copy and paste the resulting html into your website as you normally would, following best practices outlined above for adding a CC license using the license chooser.
You can see how Mike did that here, and by visiting his blog: File:Ml blog cc0 3.jpg
You can also upload your work to a content-sharing platform that supports CC0.
If you want to mark specific media, see the different examples above. You would simply exchange the CC license text with the CC0 waiver text, shown in the example below.
The text reads: "Copyright and related rights waived via CC0"
This blog post is a good example of marking an image with CC0 instead of a CC license because:
If the work you are licensing is a derivative of another work, then in addition to following best practices above, you need to let your potential users know a few things:
Remember that if your work is an adaptation of a work licensed under either CC BY-SAorCC BY-NC-SA, then your derivative work must be made available under the same license as per the ShareAlike condition.
Note: When modifying materials under one of the Version 4.0 CC licenses, you must make a note of any modifications you make to the materials, regardless of whether the modification is significant enough to merit a derivative work. For examples, see Best practices for attribution.
When you add a CC license to your work, you are only granting permissions to the rights you hold in the work. So if your work is a derivative of another creator's CC-licensed work, or otherwise incorporates third-party content under fair use or other exceptions, then you should make a note of that for your users. Your CC license only ever covers the rights you have in the content you create, and never other content by third parties.
If you are incorporating materials offered under other CC licenses, then see our best practices for attribution.
For more information, or for tips on how to mark content that is incorporated under fair use or other exceptions, see marking third-party content.
When marking your work, remember that any restriction or modification to the original license cannot be labeled a 'Creative Commons’ license. See our Trademark policy.es: Marcando tu obra con una licencia CC