Lessig

After notice and a period for comments, Creative Commons has versioned the attribution clause in our licenses. The new clause does something cool I wanted to flag. The essence of the change is to permit the copyright holder to specify what the attribution should be. Thus attribution can be to the author, or to another entity (e.g., the Wiki, or the journal in which the article was first published), or both, as the licensor specifies.

The motivation for this change was both to formalize the CC-Wiki license, which is a rebranded CC Attribution-ShareAlike licenses. With this new attribution clause, a wiki can now specify that attribution is back to the wiki. A second motivation was to help open access publishing: Now the author can require a citation that would include the original journal in which the article appeared — something many journals we eager to have in return for permitting open access publishing.