ICOM Library: Copyright: Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons -- the basics

The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools shown here create a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting within the limitations of copyright law. These tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. This combination of tools and users is a vast and growing pool of digital commons content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed and built upon. For our purposes at ICOM, if you'd like to use materials with any of these licenses, please read the following descriptions and follow the licenses' limitations and cite accordingly. In the statements below, "you" is referring to the creator of the work.

Different Creative Commons Licenses

Attribution

CC BY

This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, 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.

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Attribution-ShareAlike

CC BY-SA

This license lets others remix, adapt, 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 license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

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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.

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Attribution-NonCommercial

CC BY-NC

This license lets others remix, adapt, 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.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

CC BY-NC-SA

This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND

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.

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CC0 “No Rights Reserved”

CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law. You should only apply this to your own works.