An attribution requirement obligates whoever uses a licensed asset to credit its creator or source in a specified way \u2014 a name, a link back to the source, sometimes a link to the licence itself. It’s the defining condition of every Creative Commons licence except CC0 (the “BY” in CC BY stands for this requirement), and it also shows up in some stock agreements and open-data terms.<\/p>
Attribution is easy to satisfy correctly and easy to violate by accident, because the requirement travels with the asset but the credit text itself has to be manually reproduced wherever the asset is published \u2014 a blog post, a slide deck, a social caption. If the exact required wording only exists in the original licence document or a contributor’s message, it gets lost the moment the asset moves into general circulation inside an organization.<\/p>
Storing the attribution text as a structured field on the asset \u2014 not a note, a dedicated field the publishing workflow can pull from automatically \u2014 turns a manual compliance step into something the system enforces by default, which is the only way it scales past a handful of assets.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A licence condition mandating that the creator or source be credited in a specified form wherever the asset is used, common in Creative Commons BY licences and some stock agreements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","faq":[{"question":"What does an attribution requirement obligate a user to do?","answer":"Credit the creator or source of a licensed asset in a specified way \u2014 a name, a link back to the source, and sometimes a link to the licence itself."},{"question":"Which Creative Commons licences require attribution?","answer":"All six standard CC licences require it \u2014 it's the \"BY\" in every combination like CC BY or CC BY-NC-SA. Only the separate CC0 public-domain tool waives it."},{"question":"Why does attribution compliance often break down in practice?","answer":"The exact required wording travels with the licence document or a contributor's original email, but gets lost once the asset moves into general internal circulation without that text attached to the DAM record."},{"question":"How should the DAM store attribution text to make compliance reliable?","answer":"As a structured field on the asset itself that the publishing workflow can pull from automatically, rather than a note in a licensing spreadsheet disconnected from where publishing teams actually work."},{"question":"Who is most likely to skip a required credit line, and why?","answer":"A designer working fast under deadline, because manually retyping attribution correctly every time is where compliance breaks down at scale if the system doesn't surface it automatically."},{"question":"Besides Creative Commons, where else does attribution show up?","answer":"In some stock agreements and open-data terms, alongside the CC BY family of licences."}],"checked_date":"2026-08-07","sources":[{"statement":"Attribution (BY) is required in all six standard Creative Commons licences; only the separate CC0 tool waives it.","source_name":"Creative Commons, License Types","url":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/course\/cc-cert-edu\/unit-3-anatomy-of-a-cc-license\/3-3-license-types\/","checked":"2026-08-07"}],"kicker":"","fact_checker":0,"reading_time":0,"revisions":[],"seo_title":"","seo_description":"","noindex":false,"related":[2392,2378,2404,2384,2382,2386],"definition":"A licence condition mandating that the creator or source be credited in a specified form wherever the asset is used, common in Creative Commons BY licences and some stock agreements.","why":"A DAM should store the exact required attribution text as a structured field that auto-populates into captions and credit lines at the point of publishing, because manually retyping attribution correctly, every time, at scale, is where compliance actually breaks down \u2014 a designer working fast under deadline is the person most likely to skip a credit line that only existed in a spreadsheet nobody consulted.","example_rows":[{"field":"Required credit","values":"Photo by Jane Doe \/ CC BY 4.0"},{"field":"Placement","values":"Visible near image or in credits section"},{"field":"Licence link required","values":"Yes \u2014 link to license text"}],"mistake":"Publishing a CC BY-licensed image without the credit line because the attribution text lived in a licensing spreadsheet or the photographer's original email, disconnected from the asset record in the DAM where the publishing team actually worked.","deep_link":""},"silo":[24],"class_list":["post-2390","glossary","type-glossary","status-publish","hentry","silo-glossary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/2390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/glossary"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/2390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3510,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/2390\/revisions\/3510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"silo","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/silo?post=2390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}