Creative Commons licensing
A Creative Commons (CC) licence is a public copyright license that enables the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created.
There are six main CC licenses, some allowing you to redistribute, tweak and sell to others that are more restrictive and only allow you to download if you credit the author.
The six main CC licenses are comprised of various combinations of its four conditions:
- Attribution (BY): The work can be copied, modified, distributed, displayed, and performed, but the copyright owner must be given credit
- Non-commercial (NC): The work can be copied, modified, distributed, displayed, and performed, but no profit can be made from it
- No derivative works (ND): The work can be copied, distributed, displayed, and performed, but cannot be modified
- Share-alike (SA): The work can be modified and distributed, but derivative works must be covered by an identical licence to the original