Creative Commons License - Definition and Overview

Creative Commons, some rights reserved.

Creative Commons 2.0, some rights reserved.

The Creative Commons License refers to the name of several copyright licenses released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a US nonprofit corporation founded in 2001.

In brief, there are four key license conditions:

• Attribution (by): Permit others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and derivative works based upon it only if they give you credit.

• Noncommercial (nc): Permit others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and derivative works based upon it only for noncommercial purposes.

• No Derivative Works (nd): Permit others to copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based upon it.

• Share Alike (sa): Permit others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. (See also copyleft).

Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "nd" and "sa" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses, which is essentially the same thing as releasing into the public domain. For unknown reasons, the licenses without the attribution clause are being phased out.

None of the Creative Commons licenses have been certified by the Open Source Initiative. The Debian GNU/Linux distribution does not believe that it adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The Free Software Foundation recommends the licenses for creative works other than software and software documentation.

References

• Portions of this article are taken from the Creative Commons website, published under the Creative Commons Attribution License v1.0.

External links

• Full selection of licenses (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/)
• Creative Commons web site (http://creativecommons.org/)