Attribution

Attribution is an important legal concept. It is required by most copyright and copyleft licenses, like GNUFDL and CC-by.

The only way a person may copy some content without providing proper attribution is to ask for explicit permission. However, for public domain works, attribution is not required.

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Attribution (or mental atrribution, or attributional bias) is also a psychological concept. It means putting the blame of the glory of a given result, in the absence or better explanations, on somebody who was only partly involved, or not involved at all, somegthing akin to deificaation or diabolization. Self attribution is, when something turns good, to confer the merits to oneself.

See also attribution theory, fundamental attribution error