Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization dedicated to the sharing and access of knowledge. They’ve developed 6 copyright licenses to make it easy to assign certain permissions to a work which an author would like to share with the public. All licenses require attribution (BY) to the creator of the material when it is used or shared. The CC-BY attribution is combined with other licensing elements, such as NonCommercial (NC), NoDerivatives (ND), and ShareAlike (SA). The Creative Commons explanation of their licenses exists on their website (visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ ). Creative Commons (CC) licenses wouldn’t be applied to work that is in the public domain. Below is an explanation of the Creative Commons licenses with the least restrictive ones listed first. The following explanations were taken from A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students, published by the Rebus Community, and authored by Zoe Wake Hyde (CC-BY). The license symbols are below each explanation.
CC-BY: Attribution
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made to the original material.
CC-BY-SA: Attribution-Share Alike
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works must share the same license as the original material. This means that if someone remixes your work, or makes a new project that uses your work, they must also license that work under a CC-BY-SA license.
CC-BY-NC: Attribution-Non Commercial
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work for any non-commercial use, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made to the original material.
CC-BY-ND: Attribution-No Derivatives
Anyone is free toshare the work, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works may not be distributed. This means that you can make a remix or new project that makes use of the original work for private use, but cannot share or publish your derivative work.
CC-BY-NC-SA: Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work for any non-commercial use, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works must share the same license as the original material.
CC-BY-NC-ND: Attribution-Non Commerical-No Derivatives
Anyone is free to share the work for any non commercial use, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works may not be distributed.
The Creative Commons licenses work with other platforms, such as flickr, Wikipedia, Youtube, Vimeo, Wikimedia Commons, and MIT Open Courseware. They have a CC license generator that asks you a few questions about how you would or would not like to share your work (visit https://creativecommons.org/choose/). After answering, the page generates HTML that you can embed on your website that creates the license symbol and the link to the explanation of the license. An example of what this looks like is below:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
