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Creative Commons

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is an open licensing scheme in which creators retain the rights to their own work, but grant a licence to others to copy and distribute it in a certain manner and without the need to seek permission or pay royalties.

There are several types of licences. Some only allow material to be used as-is, while others allow users to modify the material for their own needs or to use it commercially.

Creative Commons:

  • provides user-friendly open licences for digital content
  • takes into consideration the various copyright laws in different countries
  • provides licences which include basic author rights
  • enables authors to grant permission to make copies or make changes to their work
  • enables authors to apply restrictions on permissions.

The Six Main Licences

An overview of the six main licence types of Creative Commons
The Six Main Licences

Attribution CC BY

CC-BY icon

 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. This is the license used by PLOS to make articles published in their journals immediately available online with no charges for access and no restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use, as long as the author(s) and source are cited, as specified by the Creative Commons Attribution License. View License Deed

Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA

CC-BY-SA icon

 This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects. View License Deed

Attribution-NoDerivs CC BY-ND

CC-BY-ND icon

 This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you. View License Deed

Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC

CC-BY-NC icon

 This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. View License Deed

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA

CC-BY-NC-SA icon

 This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is used by MIT OpenCourseWare to release web versions of virtually all MIT course content — under a CC BY-NC-SA license since 2004. MIT OCW has over 2000 courses available freely and openly online for anyone, anywhere to adapt, translate, and redistribute. View License Deed.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND

CC-BY-NC-ND icon

 This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially. TED Talks are licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND license, which allows them to be redistributed unmodified for non-commercial purposes. View License Deed.
Table adapted from Creative Commons and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Understanding Creative Commons Licences Conditions

Attribution

  • You must attribute the material in the way the author requests.
  • If you want to use the work without attributing the author/creator, or for endorsement purposes, you must get permission first.

NonCommercial

  • You can copy, distribute, display, perform and modify the work for any purpose, except commercially, unless you get permission first.

ShareAlike

  • You can copy, distribute, display, perform and modify the work, as long as you distribute any modified work under the same terms/licence.
  • If you want to distribute modified works under other terms, then you must get permission first.

NoDerivatives

  • You can copy, distribute, display and perform only original copies of the work.
  • You cannot modify the work, unless you get permission first.

Search Creative Commons Content

CC Search is a web based tool that searches for free content in the public domain as well as content published under Creative Commons licence. The CC Search tool currently searches across more than 300 million images. Whilst exhaustive, the amount and type of content retrieved by the search tool is not comprehensive.

A CC search browser plugin is also available that allows you to search, bookmark and download images and their attribution. Instructions for adding this plugin to your browser are available at CC Search Browser Extension

 

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