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| Use of ideas or works without attribution will have an effect on the integrity of world recorded history as great as that on the creator or originator of the recorded work. | |||
Revision as of 10:20, 10 February 2008
In copyright law, attribution is the requirement to acknowledge or credit the author of a work which is used or appears in another work. Attribution is required by most copyright and copyleft licenses, such as GNUFDL and CC-by.
Attribution is often considered the most basic of requirements made by a license, as it allows an author to accumulate a positive reputation that partially repays their work and prevents others from claiming fraudulently to have produced the work. It is also regarded a decent sign of respect to acknowledge the creator and thus give him/her credit for the work.
Typically, the only way a person may copy content without providing proper attribution is to ask for explicit permission. According to US law, attribution is not required for a work in the public domain, since the creator has given up ownership of the work. Most European copyright laws, however, advocate that the creator of a work should always be attributed, even after copyright has expired, as a sign of respect.