How to license and mark works with CC license

After choosing one of the six different CC licenses, the next, and most technical step is adopting appropriate ways to mark the work to let others understand which license has been chosen and, what the scope of authorization is. The methods of makers are various in respects of the types of works.

The most common way is that a CC marker, a line or graphic stating CC license, should be on the work or papering somewhere near the work, such as embedded in a Website to indicate that all works in this website are under CC licensed²⁰. An ideal CC marker should contain the Commons Deed and a full URL²¹. A full URL is necessary as the Deed can not show the specific jurisdiction of the license. This general method are almost suitable for any type of works, including text, image, audio, video files and, even physical medias²². An example of a CC maker is as shown in the following figure:

20 http://creativecommons.org.tw/static/technology/webpage

21 http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking#Crediting_in_Images

22 http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_Audio

Figure 5: A sample image with the CC license marker²³

On the other hand, there are several other various ways for different types of works.

For example, for audio works, a brief sound clip, or an “audio bumper”, at the beginning or end of the work, consisting of the name of the license, the full URL link to licesne and a copyright notice stating the author’s name, date and copyright information is also an effective way²⁴. A video bumper is a visual notice, which often is embedded at the beginning or end of the video work which includes the similar information of the audio bumper²⁵. Moreover, as to longer plain text works, a full segment of legal code embedded within the work can replace the combination of the common deed and a full URL²⁶.

But we have to keep in minds that there are three ways to state a same CC license:

the deed, the legal code and the digital-code. In general, the digital-code of the CC license takes the form of HTML tags embedded in the body of a CC licensed

23 http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_Image

24 http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_Audio

25 http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_Vedio

26 http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_Text

document²⁷. The following example shows a section of the digital-code for the

“Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike” CC license:

<a rel="license"

href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/">

<img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0"

src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/88x31.png" />

</a>

<br />This work is licensed under a

<a rel="license"

href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License</a>.

In the upcoming codes, “by-nc-sa” in the link

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ expresses that this webpage is authorized under the CC license “Attribution, No Commercial Use and Share Alike”

condition. A webmaster can directly embed this segment of HTML codes in his page or website to illustrate the authorization scope of the works in this site.

The following figure demonstrates a part of a Web page where the segment of above code is embedded:

Figure 6: A part of a Web page containing identical licensing information Explicitly speaking, the above part of a page can be divided into two parts: the first one is the deeds and the second one is an URL which links to the Web page containing all essential information of the specific license, including the meanings of the deeds and a link pointing to the legal code. For a robot, the second part is more important, because it contains all necessary licensing information. We will explain this point in the section 4.4.2.

27

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_is_the_Commons_Deed.3F_Wh at_is_the_legal_code.3F_What_does_the_html.2Fmetadata_do.3F

However, the syntax of digital-code in CC is too complex for people to write.

Based on the sample of digital-code above, non-programmers will be baffled by the syntax in the code snippet. In fact, CC’s designers are aware of this issue. The CC license’s Web site provides a user-friendly tool that can generate the needed digital-code. Once the code has been produced, an author needs to cut and paste the generated digital-code into their files. The syntax of the CC license code is meant for an indexing subsystem, not a human. Some humans may be uncomfortable with the extra step the CC license system requires to place the needed instructions in a document file.

In order to overcome the difficulty above; in fact, the CC website offers users a simple tool to generate the digital-code:

Figure 7: A tool offered by the CC website to generate digital-code²⁸

As shown in the above figure, a page owner has to answer three necessary questions: the former two are about the authorization conditions and the third one is about the jurisdiction. The following figure is the resulting page where the page owner can find out the generated digital-code and further instructions which teach the owner how to embed the code in his page. .

28 http://creativecommons.org/license/?lang=en_US

Figure 8: The results of CC digital-code generator²⁹

3.2 The Robots.txt and Robots Meta tags with regard to