The Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons

Here to simplify this potentially brain-bending intellectual property situation is Creative Commons Links to an external site.. This nonprofit organization, founded in 2001, has developed licenses that you can easily use to authorize specific kinds of reuse and modification of your creative works. Creative Commons explains Links to an external site. that their licenses "create a balance inside the traditional 'all rights reserved' setting that copyright law creates," which basically means that they have hammered out the related legal issues and created ways to confidently mark a creative work for other kinds of use within the bounds of copyright law.

Before outlining the different CC licenses, let's internalize a few general points. Note: if you want to do well on the recap at the end of this module, you may want to review the links within the following bytes.

Byte: As the copyright holder, you retain your right to profit Links to an external site. from your work, no matter how you have CC-licensed it.

Byte: CC licenses last as long as the copyright lasts, and can't be revoked Links to an external site.. Once you have distributed your creative work under a CC license, that's how it is. Don't be terrified or otherwise dissuaded by this--you just have to be certain about what you're doing.

Byte: In order to legitimately license your work, you must have sole ownership of the copyright Links to an external site..

Byte: Each CC license has three "layers" Links to an external site.: the human version, the lawyer version, and the robot version.

If you have other general questions about these licenses, see the Creative Commons FAQ Links to an external site..

The Licenses

Creative Commons licenses come in six different flavors, so go read about them Links to an external site.. Briefly described, they are:

CC BY: Others can do pretty much whatever they want with your work, as long as they say who the work was originally "by." This is the most "open" license.
CC BY-SA: Others can do pretty much whatever they want with your work, as long as they attribute you and, if they change it, license any changed work in the exact same way.
CC BY-ND: Others can use your work if they credit you, but they can't change it in any way ("ND" = "no derivatives").
CC BY-NC: Others can use and change your work if they credit you, even license the changed work differently, but they can't make money off of it ("NC" = "Non-commercial").
CC BY-NC-SA: Others can use and change your work if they credit you and aren't making money off of it, but they have to license any changed work in the same was as the original.
CC BY-NC-ND: Others can use your work if they credit you, but they can neither change the work nor profit from it.

Creative Commons has also worked to create a public domain license Links to an external site., if you want to waive all rights to the created work. This is legally problematic, though, for reasons articulated in the page linked in the previous sentence.

Byte: If you are using a CC-licensed material, the basic requirement is attribution, which should include (at least... look here Links to an external site.) the original author's name, title of work, and accompanying license.

As the creator of a work, choosing a license can be a bit tricky, so we'll cover that in the next module. For now, let's concern ourselves with how resources licensed in this way should be used.

Also note that these licenses are made available by Creative Commons for free use (as long as you don't go messing with the terms of the license and then go on calling it a "Creative Commons License"--but you're not going to do that, are you?)

Unfortunately, much of the material that we want to use isn't explicitly licensed like this, so we have to be creative about how we build our materials. Before we move onto the actual ground-up process of creating an open resource, let's test our understanding of these licenses and then look at some ways of getting copyrighted content that you want.