Copyright

Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. One goal of Creative Commons is to increase the amount of openly licensed creativity in “the commons” — the body of work freely available for legal use, sharing, repurposing, and remixing. Through the use of CC licenses, millions of people around the world have made their photos, videos, writing, music, and other creative content available for any member of the public to use. You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions.

About Creative Commons Licenses

The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. These tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of tools and users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.

All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially. Every Creative Commons license also ensures licensors get the credit for their work they deserve. Every Creative Commons license works around the world and lasts as long as applicable copyright lasts (because they are built on copyright). These common features serve as the baseline, on top of which licensors can choose to grant additional permissions when deciding how they want their work to be used.

The Licenses

CC offers six core licenses, each of which grants a different set of permissions:

Attribution
CC BY: This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as they credit the original creator. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered.

Attribution-ShareAlike
CC BY-SA: This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the work even for commercial purposes, as long as they provide attribution and license their new creations under the identical terms. All new works will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

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 the original creator.

Attribution-NonCommercial
CC BY-NC: This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge the original creator and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA: This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as they credit the original creator and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND: This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses, only allowing others to download the works and share them with others as long as they provide attribution, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Content adapted from Creative Commons and used under a CC-BY 4.0 license.