Open Educational Resoures (OER): Creative Commons Licensing

The Creative Commons licensing system is a simple, standardized way for creators to grant copyright permissions to their works.

When people have to pay money to see content or gain access to a product that includes the image it is then regarded as commercial use. In a sense, people are paying some portion of the total amount of money to see this image and therefore the party profits from this. If the image is used in a way where the image does not provide any profit, it is deemed non-commercial.

As a content creator, using a CC license can benefit you and the community. Here are some attached benefits :

• It can give increased exposure as others are free to use and share the work (legally). Once you have enough exposure, you can eventually make money off from future works.
• For other works, they could build off from your work to create something even better than the original work which the community can use and benefit from. CC licenses are fantastic for working collaboratively and buuilding off of each other to come up with better ideas.
• For the community, they can benefit from your work thanks to open access - using education as an example, it helps spread ideas and information.

  Attribution CC BY     This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.   View License Deed | View Legal Code

    Attribution-ShareAlike      CC BY-SA     This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.  View License Deed | View Legal Code

  Attribution-NoDerivs     CC BY-ND     This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.  View License Deed | View Legal Code

  Attribution-NonCommercial   CC BY-NC    This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.  View License Deed | View Legal Code

  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike  CC BY-NC-SA    This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.  View License Deed | View Legal Code

  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs   CC BY-NC-ND    This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.   View License Deed | View Legal Code

Creative Commons also provide tools that work in the “all rights granted” space of the public domain. The CC0 tool allows licensors to waive all rights and place a work in the public domain, and the Public Domain Mark allows any web user to “mark” a work as being in the public domain.

The content in this box is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Icons by The Noun Project.