Module 4: Creative Commons Licenses

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

Distinguish between the six available Creative Commons licenses
Identify licensing permissions when using open licensed material
Recognize how different license permission impact remixing compatibility
Select and create the appropriate license for your own work
Create attribution statements for adapted work

The Four Elements

As we’ve learned, CC licenses work with traditional copyright to facilitate reuse of created works. They do this by communicating in a standardized way the rights a creator wants to share with others.

But a Creative Commons license doesn’t mean that a user can do anything they want with the work. Some licenses allow others to copy, remix, and share their work; others allow for those activities but not for commercial purposes.

Licenses are created through a combination of four elements. Let’s define each of them and then look at how they are combined to create the Creative Commons licenses.

There are four conditions that make up any Creative Commons license. These can be mixed and matched to create six licenses for different situations:

Attribution (BY)

The Attribution (BY) element is fundamental to all CC licenses. What many creators care about most is receiving credit for their creative work. When reusing CC-licensed work, proper attribution must be given to the original creator — and to other contributors on the work, if any.

The Share-Alike element (SA) adds a requirement for anyone reusing the work to also license their own creation (based on the original work) under the same license. Both the CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA licenses include this element, effectively making them ‘copyleft’ or ‘viral’ licenses. While this condition effectively “locks open” the content, remixing SA content with non-SA or other-SA licensed work may not be straightforward or allowed at all.

Non-Commercial (NC)

The Non-Commercial element (NC) allows for reuse and sharing, but reserves commercial rights for the creator. The meaning of the NC condition itself and its ability to prevent commercial reuse is not always clear, but the license condition does clearly indicate that commercial reuse rights are not being granted.

No-Derivatives (ND)

The No-Derivatives element (ND) allows sharing and reuse but only if the content is left unchanged. This presents an issue when working with OER, as no customization or adaptation is allowed by the license. For this reason, ND content is not typically considered OER and should be considered for reuse only in situations where no adaptations are needed.

Six Licenses

The four different license elements can be mixed and matched to create licenses for different situations. There are six main license types you can use to specify what people are allowed to do with your work. These include:

Attribution: CC BY
Attribution–Sharealike: CC BY–SA
Attribution–Noncommercial: CC BY–NC
Attribution–NoDerivatives: CC BY–ND
Attribution–Noncommercial–Sharealike: CC BY–NC–SA
Attribution–Noncommercial–NoDerivatives: CC BY–NC–ND

The least restrictive license is the first one on the list: attribution. With this license, you can distribute, remix, change, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as you give credit to the creator.

As we move down the list, the licenses become more restrictive. For example, the Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives license allows you to download and share the original work as long as you give credit to the creator. You cannot distribute it commercially or make changes in any way.

Finally, Creative Commons also provides a public domain license (CC-0) for those who want to dedicate their work to the public domain or for those who want to mark existing public domain documents as such.

This graphic provides a visual representation of the four elements and six licenses:

Image Attribution: How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos by Foter, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0

Knowledge Check

Given what you learned about OER in Module 1, which of the four elements of Creative Commons licenses is NOT conducive to OER? (Hint: consider the 5Rs of OER in the context of the four elements of CC licenses and consider which don’t mesh.)