Creative Commons licenses

In recent years, Creative Commons (CC) has, in education, become the most popular licensing system. Creative Commons has designed a collection of licences to ensure that there is a suitable licence for sharing of content. The advantages of using a Creative Commons licence are as follows:

• There is almost certainly a ready-made licence that will suit the publisher’s requirements, saving time and effort in drawing up a custom licence.
• Creative Commons licences are easily understood and commonly used, so that a potential reader or re-user of a work will immediately understand the conditions of the licence.
• The licences have machine-readable metadata to help discoverability of a resource on the web.

The Creative Commons licences are based on the following:

• Legal Code: expansive legal languages tested in several cases.
• Commons Code: Simple icon-based approach to recognise the features of a licence.
• Digital Code: Enables search engines to search and locate through CC Rights Expression Language.

CC consists of four different options, which may be mixed and combined as fits:

• BY - Attribution: 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. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
• NC - Non-Commercial: This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work - and derivative works based upon it - non-commercially.
• ND - No Derivatives: This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole.
• SA - Share-Alike: This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work, as long as they license their new creations under the identical terms.

The combination of these options grants different degrees of openness to your work. You need to familiarise yourself with the contents of each of the license deeds and legal codes below.

The combinations are:

• Attribution (CC BY) License deed | Legal Code
• Attribution - Share-Alike (CC BY-SA) License deed | Legal Code
• Attribution - No Derivatives (CC BY-ND) License deed | Legal Code
• Attribution - Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) License deed | Legal Code
• Attribution - Non-Commercial - Share-Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) License deed | Legal Code
• Attribution - Non-Commercial - No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) License deed | Legal Code

Creative Commons Licenses by Foter (CC BY-SA)

It is worth trying out the Creative Commons’ online licence generator to help you work out what is the most appropriate licence. The generator provides licence information and appropriate licence graphics that can be pasted into any electronic document or alternatively HTML code that can be embedded into your web site or blog. With the answer to just two questions the generator can ascertain the most suitable licence for your resource.

How Creative Commons licenses work

Guidelines and key points

Guidelines

• Creative works dedicated to the public domain can be remixed with all the CC license types. (Remember that the public domain is not a license.)
• The Creative Commons Attribution license may be re-licensed using any of the six license types.
• Generally speaking, you may not re-license derivative works under more open licenses without prior consent from the copyright holder.
• You may never remix source materials containing a No-Derivatives restriction (however, format shifts are permissible).
• If you include any source materials using the Share-Alike provision, the derivative work must be released under the identical license. (You may include CC BY materials in a CC BY-SA or CC BY-NC-SA licensed derivative work.)

Key points

• While derivative works may be released under different licenses, the original CC license is irrevocable.
• The source materials used to create a derivative work will always be available under its original CC license.
• It protects the intentions of the original copyright holder and mitigates against exploitation of OER learning materials.

Additional resources

Creative Commons. (2022). About the licenses.

Creative Commons. (2022). License Chooser.

Creative Commons. (2022). Open Education.

Creative Commons. (2022). What we do.

Creative Commons Wiki. (2021). GFDL vs. CC-by-sa.

Fitzgerald, B. (2007). Open Content Licensing (OCL) for Open Educational Resources. QUT, Australia.

GNU. (2021). List of open content licenses.

Higgins, P. (2013). "Fair Use Creep," and other copyright bogeymen, appear in Congress. Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Menon, M. & Ali, P.K.M. (2012). Learning from advocacy: A case of OER policy implementation in the Wawasan Open University. OER Knowledge Cloud.

South African Institute for Distance Education. (2012). OER policy review and development toolkit.

Wikipedia. (2022).  Copyright.