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As a publisher, we release publications under the following license:

This publication is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0).

Some of these publications include graphics from third-party sources, such as Getty Images, Shutterstock, Picture Alliance, pixabay, or images marked as CC BY-SA. For third-party graphics, we always acquire the necessary rights and provide proper attribution directly under the images (e.g., © iStock XXX).

Our questions:

  1. Does the above wording in the imprint suffice?
  2. Should we explicitly state that the CC BY-ND 4.0 license does not apply to third-party graphics, even if proper attribution is provided?
  3. Is it permissible to include third-party graphics marked as CC BY-SA in a publication licensed under CC BY-ND?
  4. More generally, is it even possible to apply the CC BY-ND 4.0 license to the entire publication if it contains graphics for which we have only acquired limited-use rights (e.g., rights for inclusion in the publication)?

We’d appreciate your insights and any relevant experiences!

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  1. CC discuss best practices for attribution at great length on their wiki, but as I read it, your attribution is insufficient. The four elements they look for in an attribution are Title, Author, Source, and Licence; yours has only Author. They say that Title isn't necessary if the work doesn't have one, which is fair for a photo, but other than that it looks like they'd much prefer something like the following

Image by John Thirdparty, from https://thirdpartyphotos.com, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Dealing with content under a proprietary licence is outside the scope of this site.

  1. You should explicitly state the licence that does apply to any given content element, if it's not CC BY-ND. But in addition, adding to your licence statement above something like

This publication contains elements which are under different licences, and these are made clear adjacent to such elements

will put people on their guard that it's a mixed-licence publication.

  1. I think that's fine, as long as you make it clear the graphics are under CC BY-SA (see above). Drauglis suggests that a print publication is an aggregation of elements, not a single work requiring a single licence.

  2. For elements not under a free licence, the specifics of the licence on each will determine whether you can use them in a CC BY-ND work or not.

And IANAL/IANYL, so you should get professional legal advice before you bet a company on this.

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