How often are CC licenses used in Poland? Results of our web crawl analysis
We’re publishing today a research brief based on an empirical study of Creative Commons licensing on Polish web pages. The study is based on a Web crawler analysis of 20 million web pages. Based on this data, we collected a sample of Polish web pages with Creative Commons licensing information, and analysed how the licenses are used, what content is published and whether it is properly licensed.
We were particularly interested in looking not just at the scale, but also quality of CC licensing – whether people correctly mark images. We believe that CC metrics should go beyond statistics of license use, and further analysis of web pages should be conducted to better understand license use.
Here are some highlights from our study:
- Approximately 1% of Polish web pages is made available under a Creative Commons license, out of which 50% are available under one of the free licenses (CC BY or CC BY-SA).
- 60% of authors using a CC license to publish their works correctly provide copyright information and clearly mark content as CC licensed (including a full license name and a link to the license page). 20% of users fail to mention a specific license.
- This percentage is lower for sites publishing content made available under a CC license by someone else – in such a case, only 40% of pages have correct licensing information.
- 50% of content made available and used under CC licenses is photographs.
You can read an overview in English of our study here (PDF). The full study will soon be made available in Polish.