First released in December 2002 and sometimes abbreviated as CC, Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that helps provide a flexible Copyright for creative work. It allows the content creator to specify which rights they want to be reserved and which they will waive. The official Creative Commons website contains a large volume of creative works with information about licensing.

Six categories of licenses

Below are details about the six main types of Creative Commons licenses.

  • Attribution - This license allows others to distribute, tweak, remix, and build upon work, even commercially, as long as they credit the creator for the original work.
  • Attribution-NoDerivs - This license allows for commercial and non-commercial redistribution, if the work is passed along in whole and unchanged, with credit to the creator.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike - Others can remix, tweak, and build upon work for non-commercial purposes, granted they credit the creator and license any new creations under the matching terms.
  • Attribution-ShareAlike - Others can remix, tweak, and build upon work for commercial and non-commercial purposes, as long as they credit the creator and license new creations under the matching terms.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial - This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon work for non-commercial purposes, crediting the creator. Derivative works do not have to be licensed under these terms.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs - Others can download work and share it if they credit the creator, don’t change the work in any way, or don’t use it for monetary gain.

Example Creative Commons license

Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Business terms, CC, Computer abbreviations, Copyleft, Copyright, EFF, GNU, Open source