TAL: Title, Author, License

A good rule of thumb is to recall the acronym TAL, which stands for Title, Author, and License.

Title – What is the name of the material? Please provide the title of the work you are adopting. Be sure to hyperlink the title to the original sources. If a hyperlink is not available, describe where you got the work.
Author – Who owns the material?Please name the author or authors of the material in question. Sometimes, the licensor may want you to give credit to some other entity, like a company or pseudonym. In those cases, please just do what they request. Also, if the author has a webpage, please link to the author’s page.
License – How can I use it?Please provide the exact name of the Creative Commons license under which the work was released, and hyperlink the license name to the license deed page. You can use the acronyms instead of full name of the license.

You are obviously using the material for free thanks to the CC license, so make note of it. Don’t just say the material is Creative Commons, because that says nothing about how the material can actually be used. Remember that there are six different CC licenses; which one is the material under? Name and provide a link to it, (eg. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ for CC BY. The above content is from CC Wiki, CC-BY.)

Let’s Practice

Let’s say you found a CC-licensed image of an elephant on Flickr, and you want to add it to your document. You can do it without asking for anybody’s permission, as this image was released with a CC license, but you would still need to attribute the work in the manner specified by the author. Follow the steps below to learn how:

Step 1:

After successfully locating the image, first check the license information to see if the image is truly openly licensed. All image repositories offering CC licensed images, such as Flickr or Wikimedia Commons, have their own way to provide license information. For example, in Flickr it is located below the image.

Screenshot: Flickr image of man walking with 3 elephants, CC license circled in bottom right corner

Step 2:

Click the Some rights reserved link. You will be taken to the Creative Commons license deed where you can check the type of CC license used. To cite the license link in your attribution, copy the URL of the deed in the browser.

Screenshot: Creative Commons licensing deed page, page url circled

Step 3:

We’ve now confirmed the image is CC licensed (which means it is safe to use) and copied the URL of the license deed. To complete the attribution, we need to credit the author by citing the author’s name (or user identification) and the work title.

Screenshot: Flickr image of man walking with 3 elephants, author name and image title circled

Step 4:

Copy the URLs of the image and the author page.

Step 5:

We have collected all the information needed to make a proper attribution (title, author, license deed, and URLs to all three components).

Step 6:

Please see the example below. Notice that I linked the name to the person’s profile page and linked the title directly to the original work.

Screenshot: Original flickr image of man walking with 3 elephants

Elephant March by William Warby is licensed under CC BY

Example Attributions

Below are some examples of ideal attribution and incorrect attribution.

Type of Media	Examples of Ideal Attribution	Why
Image	Elephant@Amboseli by Xiaojun Deng is licensed under CC BY.	Title “Elephant@Amboseli” is noted. Author “Xiaojun Deng” is noted and linked to his profile page. Source “Elephant@Amboseli” is linked to original Flickr page. License “CC BY” is linked to license deed.
Course Content	Module 4: Protein Structure © 2013 Open Learning Initiative is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.	Title “Module 4: Protein Structure” is noted. Author “Open Learning Initiative” -linked to the project page. Source “Module 4: Protein Structure“-linked to original course content page. License “CC BY-NC-SA” is linked to license deed.
*Derivative Work	This work, “Elephant in yellow”, is a derivative of Elephant@Amboseli by Xiaojun Deng, used under CC BY. “elephant in yellow” is licensed under CC BY by Boyoung Chae.	Title, Original Author, Source, and License are all noted. Made it clear that it is a derivative work. New author of the derivative work is also noted.
Offline Document	“Elephant@Amboseli” by Xiaojun Deng is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License .	Title, Original Author, Source, and License are all noted. The licensed type and the URL are spelled out in full.

Type of Media	Examples of Incorrect Attribution	Why
Image	Elephant Photo: Creative Commons Licensed.	Author is not noted. Creative Commons is not the author of this photo. There is no link to original photo. There is no mention of the license, much less a link to the license. “Creative Commons” is an organization.
*Derivative Work	This work, “Green Banana”, is a derivative of “Banana!” by Graham Reznick used under CC BY NC-ND. “Green Banana” is licensed under CC BY by Boyoung Chae.	There is no link to original photo. The original photo was released under CC BY-NC-ND, which means that the user is not permitted to distribute the modified material.

*Derivative Works:

A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already existing works. Common derivative works include translations, musical arrangements, motion picture versions of literary material or plays, art reproductions, abridgments, and condensations of preexisting works. Another common type of derivative work is a “new edition” of a preexisting work in which the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an original work. To learn more about Derivative works, please read Copyright in Derivative Works and Compilations by US Copyright office.

For example, the IGNIS logo (on the right) is a derivative built from the original lightning image (on the left). Sparks by PhotoGraham used under CC BY NC SA 2.0

Original Image	Derivative

To learn more about Derivative works, please read Copyright in Derivative Works and Compilations by the US Copyright office.

For more guidance on attributing a Creative Commons licensed work, please visit CC Wiki-Best Practices for Attribution.