When I was at Mozilla and WMF, I frequently got asked how to give proper credit when using Creative Commons-licensed images in slideshows. I got the question again last week, and am working on slides right now, so here’s a quick guide.

The basics

First, a quick refresher. To comply with Creative Commons (CC) attribution requirements, you need to provide four things in a “reasonable” manner:

1. the title of the work (if there is one);
2. the author (might be an internet username);
3. the source (where you got it); and
4. the license (including version).

CC helpfully condenses those to “TASL“. An example:

Creating this information has traditionally been a pain, but this one were generated with one click by the great new “copy credit as text” button in the CC search beta!

Once you’ve created an appropriate credit line, the question, then, is what is a “reasonable” way to put it into a slide deck? There are a few options.

The maximalist option

An obvious option is to put the credit information on every slide, like the lower right hand corner here:

This has some benefits:

• Clearly complies with the license.
• Regularly reminds the audience that the images are available and reusable.
• If you reorganize the slides, the credit stays with the image.

Things that aren’t so great:

• Distracts from your message.
• Very difficult to read, so not very useful to the audience, or motivating for the author.

What Lessig does

To keep the focus on his content, Creative Commons founder Lessig puts all his attributions on a single slide at the end of each talk. (This is consistent with his famous “Lessig method” — large, bold images and very few words.) You can see an example just before the end of a talk he gave in 2013. Note that Lessig does not give an oral explanation of what is on the slide, or mention of the license, since they are shown during applause.

My own slides do something similar:

I give more detail by providing links, and note that all images are specifically CC BY-SA 3.0 unless otherwise noted.

So what’s good/bad about this approach? Good:

• Doesn’t distract from your message as a speaker (which is the reason you’re speaking, after all!)
• Complies with the license, since it is “reasonable” for the slide medium.

Bad:

• Doesn’t give the authors much recognition.
• Only weakly informs the audience that that the images are available and reusable (since it is at the end and nearly unreadable).
• If you reorder your slides, or copy and paste into a different deck, you also have to remember to reorder/reuse your attribution slide.

Improving recognition and utility

Given those drawbacks, here are two things you can consider doing to improve on Lessig’s approach.

Fix utility with a clear link to downloadable information

Consider adding a slide at the end, before the full attribution slide, that provides a download link and mentions the license — something like “download slides, and get links and licenses for images, at lu.is/talks“. If you leave that slide up during Q&A, and the URL is short and memorable, the audience can easily find the licensing information later when it is useful to them.

Recognize authors with a thank-you slide

The small type and quick flash of a long attribution slide may be legally compliant, but it does not help give authors the recognition they often want. So consider adding a “thank you” slide with just the names of authors, and a prominent CC logo, without any titles and licensing information. It will make the authors happy, especially if any of them are in the audience!