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Open Educational Resources: Creative Commons

Creative Commons Introduction

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that provides free, easy to use copyright licenses to make a simple and standardized way to give public permission to share and use creative work.

Copyright vs. Creative Commons Licenses

Copyright

Is the intellectual property law that protects a creative work from theft or misuse. It is the creator's legal claim to the work he or she creates. By default, any original creative work is copyrighted to the creator when that work is expressed in a tangible form. 

Creative Commons

  • Is a non-profit organization that provides free, easy to use copyright licenses to make a simple and standardized way to give public permission to share and use creative work.
  • Creative Commons licenses let the creator change their copyright terms from all rights reserved to "some rights reserved".
  • Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright, they work alongside copyright.

Differences

When you create a work, you already have the copyright, but you can add the Creative Commons layer to that work as well. You are not giving up copyright, but modifying it to indicate specifically how the content can be used by others.

Questions?

Consult the Creative Commons FAQ

Licenses offered by Creative Commons

  Attribution CC BY     This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.   View License Deed | View Legal Code

 

    Attribution-ShareAlike      CC BY-SA     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.  View License Deed | View Legal Code

 

  Attribution-NoDerivs     CC BY-ND     This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.  View License Deed | View Legal Code

 

  Attribution-NonCommercial   CC BY-NC    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 | View Legal Code

 

  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike  CC BY-NC-SA    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.  View License Deed | View Legal Code

 

  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs   CC BY-NC-ND    This license is the most restrictive of our 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.   View License Deed | View Legal Code

 

Creative Commons also provide tools that work in the “all rights granted” space of the public domain. The CC0 tool allows licensors to waive all rights and place a work in the public domain, and the Public Domain Mark allows any web user to “mark” a work as being in the public domain.

 

The content in this box is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Icons by The Noun Project.


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