Basics of CC

The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That someone is Creative Commons.

Although Creative Commons is best known for licenses, our work extends beyond just providing copyright licenses. CC offers a number of other legal and technical tools that also facilitate sharing and discovery of creative works. Unlike other public legal tools, Creative Commons’ licenses and tools were designed specifically to work with the web, which makes content that is offered under their terms easy to search for, discover and use. CC also offers other legal tools, such as CC0, a public domain dedication for rightsholders who wish to put their work into the public domain in advance of the expiration of applicable copyright, and the Public Domain Mark, a tool for marking a work that is in the worldwide public domain.

People who use Creative Commons licences are contributing to a global pool of reusable original works. Everyone is able to reuse those works, leading to a culture of sharing and fostering new ideas and opportunities. Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet ― universal access to research and education, full participation in culture ― to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.

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Source content for this narrative:

• Creative Commons Informational Flyer (pdf) and on scribd
• Creative Commons brochure (pdf) by CC Aotearoa New Zealand
• http://creativecommons.org/about

Creative Commons (CC) is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. Our legal tools help those who want to encourage reuse of their works by offering them for use under generous, standardized terms, those who want to make creative uses of works, and those who want to benefit from this symbiosis.

Absolutely not. Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses, and depend on the existence of copyright to work. CC licenses simply help creators extend reuse and remixing rights of their creative work to the public.

Creative Commons licenses are legal tools that creators and other rightsholders can use to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights. The six Creative Commons licenses provide a simple vocabulary for what would otherwise be a complicated agreement between creator and licensee. By selecting a license, copyright holders choose which rights they’d like to keep and what types of reuse to allow.

At a minimum, all CC license allow users to download and share your work with others. They must also always credit you credit through attribution (BY) when they do so. You can choose what other limits you want to place on sharing. CC licenses make it easy to retain the rights to make commercial use of your work (NC), make derivative works from your work (ND), or to require future remixes to carry the same license (SA).

Creative Commons licenses are free of charge (gratis) for anyone to use. CC doesn’t require or provide registration for creators who use CC them. CC licenses can be applied to many types of creative work; Websites, videos, audio/music files, images, documents, and more can all be CC-licensed. Head over to the license chooser on the CC website (creativecommons.org/choose) or the marking section of the CC wiki (wiki.creativecommons.org/marking) for more information.

Hundreds of millions of works have been released under a Creative Commons license, and many of them can be found by using search engines or browsing content platforms. CC Search (search.creativecommons.org) is also a good starting point when looking for CC-licensed work.