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One of the requirements for Attribution when sharing CC-licensed material that requires attribution is to retain:

identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated);

What are reasonable and unreasonable manners of identification of creators? Does reasonable and unreasonable refer to the identification itself, such as an identification that violates local hate speech laws or a platform's terms of service? Or does it refer to some other attribute or type of identification?

ohwilleke
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Thomas Owens
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4 Answers4

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I can find no case law that interprets this particular provision. But reasonableness generally is an "all things considered" test that turns on all of the circumstances.

The licence itself expressly refers to practical considerations that inform the reasonableness analysis:

You may satisfy the conditions in Section 3(a)(1) in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.

Illegality of a particular form of requested attribution would presumably also be considered by a fact-finder.

Jen
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Reasonable is a legal term of art

Something is reasonable if the hypothetical reasonable person would consider it reasonable. A reasonable person in these circumstances is a person availing themselves of the CC licence for their particular purpose in a particular medium. Reasonable attribution is any of the numerous ways that that hypothetical person might do it. Any method that allows the original copyright owner to be readily identified is likely reasonable.

Now, if it were done it a way that violates local law or disparages the author, that might be an offence and defamation respectively - these may expose the licensee to prosecution or lawsuit. One could argue that doing so in such a way is not reasonable and therefore violates the licence, however, this is by no means certain. The reasonableness test is applied to all the circumstances which means there may be circumstances where such a method of attribution is reasonable and others where it is not.

Dale M
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As an addition to the other answers: The reason this (indeed rather vague) rule was added to the CC licenses is because the GFDL (the "prototype" of all free licenses) did not have such a clause. The GFDL requires that the full license text is always included with every distributed item. IIRC some even argue that the GFDL requires the attribution to be done in a manner the licensor has defined (e.g. they may require that their name be put in very bold letters over the whole item).

In particular for images and videos and in an online-world, this is not reasonable. You don't want to print a large disclaimer, let alone the full legalese of a license after every image on a webpage. That's what links are for. Therefore the CC licenses explicitly say that it should be ok to just print "Image from @someuser, CC-BY-SA" at the bottom of the image to satisfy the attribution requirement.

Reference

PMF
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Reasonable is the Ordinary Person and Person on the Bus

Think of a random person on the street or bus. They have a reasonable expectation that there is a fare, that it is noted somewhere and an expectation that the driver knows it or has the leaflet. They also have a rough expectation of where on the bus stop the times are when the bus drives and where the bus stops (or were reasonable enough to ask the driver if they stop where they want to go). In general, they know their way around and are law abiding.

Now, this person is on the Bus, and we grab them to ask "Is this demand for the shape the attribution shall take reasonable?" They are pretty much a stand in for the theoretical perfect juror - or rather "finder of fact", where there is no jury (e.g. bench trial or civil law jurisdictions as opposed to common law ones). While this test isn't explicitly existing there, very similar ones exist in civil law.

Since the reasonable person is law abiding, an attribution to a person's alias that would be illegal is not reasonable (e.g. you can not use "Heil Hitler" as attribution line in Germany, as that wuld be considered illegal in many countries in many regards).

Determining what is reasonable

What is reasonable is a question to the Fact finder, who needs to put themselves in the shoes of the ordinary person on the bus.

Trish
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