About CC Licenses - Creative Commons (2024)

FAQs

What is CC by Creative Commons license? ›

Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law.

There are six different Creative Commons licenses: CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND. The letter pairs indicate conditions for use.

You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution: crediting the author and noting the source and the license. Generally speaking, attribution must reasonably include all relevant information supplied by the licensor.

The act of applying a CC license is easy, but there are several important considerations to think through before you do. CC BY License Icon. Trademark: Creative Commons.

Creative Commons offers licenses and tools to the public free of charge and does not require that creators or other rights holders register with CC in order to apply a CC license to a work.

CC licenses are appropriate for all types of content you want to share publicly, except software and hardware. Specify precisely what it is you are licensing. Any given work has multiple elements; e.g., text, images, music. Make sure to clearly mark or indicate in a notice which of those are covered by the license.

They enable people to freely share and build upon existing works, which speeds innovation and the advancement of human knowledge. They allow more people to participate in the creation and remix of our cultural outputs. They bring people together around a set of socially-minded values.

A lyricist, for example, might use the phrase "for you and I" instead of the correct form, "for you and me," in order to rhyme. A visual artist might distort a shape, change a color, or rearrange objects in a work in order to create a more pleasing or evocative image.

The con to using these licenses is in the lack of control an author may have over their content. A reuse of content can't be revoked under a Creative Commons License once granted – unlike removing copyright permissions. Also, authors need to be very careful about which license they use.

What can you do with a Creative Commons license? ›

Our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give your permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. You can adopt one of our licenses by sharing on a platform, sharing your work with an open license, or dedicating your work to the public domain.

If someone is using a CC licensed work without giving attribution or otherwise following the license, their right to use the work ends automatically as soon as they violate the license terms.

The Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license or “BY-NC-ND” is the most restrictive license offered by CC. It allows people to use the unadapted work for noncommercial purposes only, and only as long as they give credit to the creator.

Every Creative Commons license allows the creator to retain copyright whilst allowing others to copy and distribute and make use of their work non-commercially. The Creative Commons license also ensures creators get the recognition and credit for the work they produce and share.

The licenses and CC0 are irrevocable. Irrevocable means a legal agreement that cannot be canceled. That means once you apply a CC license to a work, the CC license applies to the work until the copyright on the work expires.

Copyright law gives creators certain kinds of control over their creative work. If people want to use copyrighted work, they often have to ask for permission from the creator. Creative Commons works within copyright law. It allows creators to grant permission to everyone in the world to use their work in certain ways.

Whereas a CC BY is the most liberal license, the CC BY-NC-ND is the most restrictive: this license only allows re-users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form and for noncommercial purposes.

“BY” stands for attribution (the obligation to credit the author and other parties designated for attribution); “NC” stands for NonCommercial (commercial use is excluded from the licence grant); “ND” means NoDerivatives (only verbatim copies of the work can be shared) and “SA” represents ShareAlike (i.e. the work can ...

CC BY 4.0 This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered.