By Attribution

Flickr lets each user easily choose under which license they want to publish their work:

• None (All rights reserved)
• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons
• Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons
• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
• Attribution Creative Commons
• Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons
• Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons

Say, you would like to make your photos to be available as freely as possible - make derivative works, use commercially, whatever. The most permissive of these licenses is the Creative Commons Attribution license, which only requires that the users of your work attribute you.

But what does it mean to attribute? According to the Creative Commons license:

You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

Some Flickr users do specify how to attribute, but most of them don't, and that's perfectly ok, as not all of them are lawyers. But still, how do you attribute when the author hasn't specified how. Buried deep inside the legal text you find that the license does in fact say how one should attribute:

You must [--] keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide [--]:

(i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied [--]

(ii) the title of the Work if supplied;

(iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work [--]

(iv) [--] in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). [--]

Note that I have heavily edited the above text as the original blub of legalese is almost impossible to read. Luckily it all follows a common sense.

It's easy to attribute when you just use or adapt a single work. It's not particularly hard to attribute 3, 5 or even 10 works. But what if you want to use hundreds of works? Say, you would like to create a photographic mosaic, that kind of work needs thousands of photos to choose from and only few hundreds of those photos get chosen by the program. In that case attributing becomes a far greater trouble than the work required to create the mosaic at the first place.

I'm sure many people would happlily give their photos away without not even attribution required, but Flickr doesn't provide that option.