How do Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools work technically?
The Creative Commons licenses have three elements: The human-readable deed, the lawyer-readable legal code, and the machine-readable metadata. When a work is licensed with CC tools, it is highly recommended that a CC badge, text, or other marker somehow accompany that work. There are many possible modes for marking. Most commonly, people use the CC License Chooser to generate a bit of HTML code that they can paste onto the licensed work, but that is not always necessary. Many platforms and web services such as Flickr, WordPress, and Drupal have CC licensing built in so that you can choose an appropriate license for your works and the service adds the proper marking, including metadata, for you. Best practices for marking a work as licensed with CC tools: • A visual indicator (some combination of text and images) that the work is licensed with one of the CC licenses. • A link to the human-readable license deed (which itself contains a link to the lawyer-readable legal code). • Embedded
