Attribution Policy

I’ve licensed all the content on my blog under a Creative Commons Attribution License. This means that without requesting my permission, you are free to:

The goal of my doing this is to foster a more streamlined, web-friendly process under which my creations can be reused without burdening myself with use requests and without slowing down anyone in their pursuit to create something new.

However, this license stipulates one condition that I value very highly: “You must attribute the work” of mine that you use to me “in the manner specified by the author or licensor.” This page exists to describe what means of attribution I prefer.

Text Attribution Online

As my blog exists on the web and most uses of the content found in my blog will be used on the web, my preferred and the standard means of attribution are to link back to the original blog post containing the content you used. If the content you used is a text excerpt, you might include that in your blog as a blockquote, like so:

<blockquote>
<a href="http://justinsomnia.org/2006/03/my-first-cease-and-desist-letter/">It seems that 
Exodus International, the "largest Christian referral and information ministry" in the ex-gay
movement has hired Liberty Counsel, "a legal organization dedicated to advancing its organizers' 
conceptions of religious freedom the sanctity of human life and the traditional family," 
to try and get [Justin Watt] to take down [his] PARODY of Exodus' "Question Homosexuality" 
billboard campaign.</a>
</blockquote>

Which comes out looking something like this:

It seems that Exodus International, the “largest Christian referral and information ministry” in the ex-gay movement has hired Liberty Counsel, “a legal organization dedicated to advancing its organizers’ conceptions of religious freedom the sanctity of human life and the traditional family,” to try and get [Justin Watt] to take down [his] PARODY of Exodus’ “Question Homosexuality” billboard campaign.

As derivative works are allowed, if not explicitly encouraged, you can feel free to correct spelling, fix grammar, use ellipses (…), replace pronouns, etc.

If it doesn’t make sense for the entire excerpt to link back to the original blog post (as I’ve done above), you can append any of the following to the end of the excerpt:

Even though some of the attribution examples above only display the text “justinsomnia.org”, I still prefer that you link back to the URL of the post from which you got the content (instead of just the homepage of my blog, http://justinsomnia.org/). Not only do I appreciate this, but your readers will find the more specific attribution link more meaningful—as they won’t have to dig through my site trying to find the original source content you used.

However, the list isn’t exhaustive, it’s merely suggestive. For instance, instead of “Source:”, you might want to use an em-dash, e.g.

—Justin of justinsomnia.org

Image Attribution Online

If you want to use an image from my blog on your site, I’d suggest linking the image to the post you got it from:

<a href="http://justinsomnia.org/2005/09/question-intolerance/">
<img src="http://example.com/images/straight_unhappy.jpg" alt="Straight? Unhappy? www.gay.com billboard parody" />
</a>

Where example.com is replaced with the server and path where you’ve uploaded the image. Please do not directly link (aka deeplink, or hotlink) to the images on my blog, as this effectively steals my webhosting bandwidth, which I pay for. Save the image you want to use to your local computer by right clicking on the image and choosing “Save Image As” (“Save Picture As” in Internet Explorer) and then upload it to your webserver.

If the image you used from my blog has been modified or included in a derivative work, it might not make sense to link the whole image back to the post from which you got it. In this case including any of the “Source:” attribute links listed above somewhere near the image or in the text of a surrounding blog post will suffice.

Attribution in Print

In print media, please choose from the following attribution suggestions, listed in order of preference.

Again, “Source:” can be replaced with the appropriate attribution notation for the publication, such as an em-dash.

Exceptions

Some of the code I’ve written and offered for download is licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL). All such code includes the standard GPL header text at the top of the source.