Detecting Creative Commons License Violations on Images on the World Wide Web

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that has been striving to provide simple, uniform, and understandable licenses that content creators can use to issue their content under. These licenses provide a solution to the problem of copyright on the Web, while ensuring that the culture of reusing existing works to foster creativity is not hindered. There are many online tools in photo sharing sites such as Flickr and EveryStockPhoto that generate Creative Commons license information associated with their content in machine readable form. This information is generally included in the metadata of the content. However, not much effort has been on actually detecting whether a license has been violated or not. This paper describes of a method for identifying whether a particular kind of Creative Commons license, namely attribution, has been violated, with a focus on Flickr images on the Web.