Informatics Practices · Ch 6 — Societal Impacts
Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that works to build a publicly accessible global platform. Its goal is to make a wide range of creative and academic works available for anyone to share freely. Anyone across the globe can access these works, share them, and even use them to create their own new work — all without infringing the copyright or intellectual property rights of the original owners. In fact, the system ensures that proper attribution is given to the owners.
The organisation provides Creative Commons (CC) licenses free of charge. These licenses allow the owner of a work to grant copyright permissions for their creative or academic works in a free, simple, and standardised way. A CC license is a type of copyright license that enables the free distribution of a copyrighted work. It is used when an author wants to give others the right to share, use, and extend the work they have done.
The work licensed under CC is still governed by copyright law. This means CC licenses apply to all types of work — art, music, literature, dramatics, movies, images, educational resources, photographs, and software. The CC Search feature on the online platform makes it easier to find licensed material.
The author of the content is given full freedom to set conditions for how others may use their work. The owner can combine these conditions to create six different types of CC licenses.
The Six Creative Commons Licenses
The six licenses are built from four basic conditions: Attribution (BY), ShareAlike (SA), NoDerivs (ND), and NonCommercial (NC). Each license is a combination of these conditions.
| License Name | Symbolic Name | License Icon | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Attribution-NoDerivs | CC BY-ND |  | 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| License Name | Symbolic Name | License Icon | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Attribution-NoDerivs | CC BY-ND | | 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |