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In copyright law, attribution is the requirement to acknowledge or credit the author of a work which is used or appears in another work. Attribution is required by most copyright and copyleft licenses, such as GNUFDL and CC-by.
Attribution is often considered the most basic of requirements made by a license, as it allows an author to accumulate a positive reputation that partially repays their work and prevents others from claiming fraudulently to have produced the work. It is also regarded a decent sign of respect to acknowledge the creator and thus give him/her credit for the work.
Typically, the only way a person may copy content without providing proper attribution is to ask for explicit permission. According to US law, attribution is not required for a work in the public domain, since the creator has given up ownership of the work. Most European copyright laws, however, advocate that the creator of a work should always be attributed, even after copyright has expired, as a sign of respect.
Psychology
Attribution is also a psychological concept. When people watch the world, they do not see it as a completely random stream of happenings, but tend to attribute meanings to things. So, for example when you see someone fall over, you can attribute this to a stable trait ("clumsiness"), or to a feature of the situation ("banana peel on the floor"), or to random chance ("just one of those crazy flukes"). There are a number of theories about the orderly ways in which people make these attributions (see attribution theory), and there are a number of well documented quirks in the way people make them (see attributional bias, and fundamental attribution error).
See also
"Attribution"