Creative Commons licenses

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Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001.

Many of the licences, notably all the original licences, grant certain "baseline rights",[1] such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work without changes, at no charge. Some of the newer licences do not grant these rights.

Creative Commons licenses are currently available in 34 different jurisdictions worldwide, with nine others under development.[2]

Contents

The original set of licences all grant the "baseline rights". The details of each of these licences depends on the version, and comprises a selection of four conditions:

  • Attribution (by): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.
  • Noncommercial or NonCommercial (nc): Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only for noncommercial purposes.
  • No Derivative Works or NoDerivs (nd): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based on it.
  • ShareAlike (sa): Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original 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 equivalent to releasing one's work into the public domain. The five of the eleven valid licenses that lack the Attribution element have been phased out because 98% of licensors requested Attribution, but are still available for viewing on the website.[3] There are thus six regularly used licenses:

  1. Attribution alone (by)
  2. Attribution + Noncommercial (by-nc)
  3. Attribution + NoDerivs (by-nd)
  4. Attribution + ShareAlike (by-sa)
  5. Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)
  6. Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike (by-nc-sa)

A number of additional licenses have been introduced, which are more specialized:

  • Sampling licenses, with two options:
    • Sampling Plus - parts of the work can be copied and modified for any purpose other than advertising, and the entire work can be copied for noncommercial purposes
    • Noncommercial Sampling Plus - the whole work or parts of the work can be copied and modified for noncommercial purposes

Besides licenses, Creative Commons also offers an easy way to release material into the public domain through the Public Domain Dedication, as well as Founder's Copyright, through which the work is released into the public domain after 14 or 28 years.

Due to either disuse or criticism, a number of previously offered Creative Commons licenses has since been retired[4], and are no longer recommended for new works. The retired licenses include all licenses lacking the Attribution element[5], as well as two licenses not allowing non-commercial copying:

  • Sampling – parts of the work can be used for any purpose other than advertising, but the whole work can't be copied or modified
  • DevNations – a Developing Nations license, which only applies to countries deemed by the World Bank as a "non-high-income economy". Full copyright restrictions apply to people in other countries.

The maintainers of Debian GNU/Linux, a Linux distribution known for its adherence to software freedom, do not believe that even the Creative Commons Attribution License, the least restrictive of the licenses, adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines due to the license's anti-DRM provisions (which could restrict private redistribution to some extent) and its requirement in section 4a that downstream users remove an author's credit upon request from the author.[6] As the other licenses are identical to the Creative Commons Attribution License with further restrictions, Debian considers them non-free for the same reasons. There have been efforts to remove these problems in the new version 3.0 licences, so they can be compatible with the DFSG.[7] As of July 2007, it remains to be seen if version 3 of the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses will be approved by Debian.[8]

The Free Software Foundation accepts some of the Creative Commons licences as being sufficiently free for creative works other than software, but recommends the Free Art license over any of the Creative Commons licences.[9] Richard Stallman, president of FSF, has explained that this avoids the problem with the overly vague statement "I use a Creative Commons license" , without noting the actual license.[10] In the past, he also criticised particular licenses for not allowing the freedom to make verbatim copies of the work for noncommercial purposes, and said that he no longer supported Creative Commons as an organisation, as the licenses no longer all had this freedom in common.[11] However, Creative Commons have since retired these licenses, and no longer recommends their use.[12]

 Free software Portal

  1. ^ Baseline rights and restrictions in CC licenses
  2. ^ Creative Commons Worldwide
  3. ^ Creative Commons Licenses
  4. ^ Lessig, Lawrence (2007-06-04). Retiring standalone DevNations and one Sampling license. Creative Commons. Retrieved on 2007-07-05.
  5. ^ Retired Licenses. Creative Commons. Retrieved on 2007-07-05.
  6. ^ debian-legal Summary of Creative Commons 2.0 Licenses by Evan Prodromou
  7. ^ Garlick, Mia (2007-02-23). Version 3.0 Launched. Creative Commons. Retrieved on 2007-07-05.
  8. ^ Creative Commons Version 3.0 Licenses — A Brief Explanation: Debian. Creative Commons. Retrieved on 2007-07-05.
  9. ^ FSF's page on licences for works other than software and documentation
  10. ^ Stallman explains his stance in Brazil, 2006
  11. ^ Free Software Foundation blog
  12. ^ http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7520

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

Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_licenses"
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