Giving Credit Where Credit is Due
All six of the Creative Commons licenses include the BY or attribution condition. This is a requirement of reuse. The original creator has explicitly informed the user of this requirement through the use of the BY condition. As you learned in the slide show presentation earlier in this unit, citations and attributions are similar but different. Providing attribution is the legal requirement of the open license. While some tools, like CC Search, include the attribution in the resource, there are other tools available to help users easily create attribution statements for work they reuse, remix, or modify.
- Attribution Builder – created by Open Washington, this tool, similar to a citation generator, builds attribution statements that can be copied and pasted into documents and websites. Note: all the attribution statements for these units were created using this tool.
When creating attribution statements a good rule of thumb is to remember the acronym TASL:
- Title of the work
- Author of the work
- Source or where the work can be found
- License of the work