Creative Commons license

“ Placing work under a Creative Commons license is an irrevocable act; one cannot rescind the rights one has bestowed on others after the fact. It is important to reiterate, as above, that these licenses do not replace or abolish copyright because, without copyright, an author could not make any claim over the work, including the right to attribution. ”

“ By attaching a Creative Commons license, you give permission to anyone to reproduce, distribute, perform, display, and make derivative works from your works as long as the conditions in the license are followed. ”

“ As mentioned earlier, there is a Creative Commons license called the Developing Nations License, which can be implemented by anyone licensing a work. This license allows those in developing countries to use the work for creative, cultural, and developmental purposes, while still retaining full copyright in developed countries.
The distinction made with the Developing Nations License is important, because many creators may feel uncomfortable with the thought of putting their work or ideas entirely into the public domain, especially in regards to the commercially driven developed world. ”

“ To add a final layer of complexity, different versions of each Creative Commons license exist that are tailored to the particularities of different national legal systems, and where a particular jurisdiction’s version of the license applies, it is common to so note. ”

“ Not every person who employs a Creative Commons license for their work is doing it solely for economic gain. Andy Raskin maintains that "whatever the reason, every artist who embraces Creative Commons helps to build its brand. It is a classic case of network effects: As more of the licenses appear on the web, the collective value of the Creative Commons body of work increases, which creates greater incentives for other artists to use the licenses" (Raskin, 2004, 15) . ”

“ Before considering which Creative Commons license best meets this requirement, it is worth considering the role of copyright in general. We should ask whether copyright even has a valid function in the context of science and scholarship. Ideas, principles and scientific results aren't protected by the copyright. And reputation is the currency in science, not money. No researcher needs an incentive (such as that provided in copyright law) to do research or to publish his results. Copyright, with its restrictions, simply isn't an appropriate instrument in this sector. ”

“ Creative Commons licenses present authors, in effect, with a menu of license criteria, each reflecting a particular policy decision, from which the author is free to pick and choose. The various possible license criteria (and the recognized Creative Commons abbreviations) are:
Attribution (“BY”) : should users be required to give credit to the original author and/or publisher when they copy or reuse the licensed work? Noncommercial (“NC”) : are users free to copy or reuse the licensed work for commercial purposes, or for noncommercial purposes only? ”

“ The joint action of the FSF and the WMF to enable the relicensing of Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license tends to suggest that one of the common criticisms of open-content licensing—namely, that a proliferation of license standards impedes rather than promotes sharing and reuse of the licensed content—has been overstated. ”

“ Creative Commons licenses Although the GFDL extended open-content licensing principles outside the domain of software, the license remains tied to a specific context, namely, the licensing of software manuals and other texts. Many provisions of the GFDL, such as the references to “title pages,” “cover texts,” “invariant sections,” [123] are difficult to understand or to apply outside the context of literary works. ”

“ A CC license on a given work only covers the copyright held by the person who applied the license—the licensor. This might sound obvious, but it is an important point to understand. For example, many employers own the copyright to works created by their employees, so if an employee applies a CC license to a work owned by their employer, they are not able to give any permission whatsoever to reuse the work. The person who applies the license needs to be either the creator or someone who has acquired the rights to the work. ”

“ CC licenses are appropriate for creators who have created something protectable by copyright, such as an image, an article, or a book, and who want to provide people with one or more of the permissions governed by copyright law. For example, if you want to give others permission to freely copy and redistribute your work, you can use a CC license to grant those permissions. Likewise, if you want to give others permission to freely transform, alter, or otherwise create derivative works based on your work, you can use a CC license to grant those permissions. ”

“ Creative Commons licenses are standardized tools, but part of the vision is to provide a range of options for creators who are interested in sharing their works with the public rather than reserving all rights under copyright. ”

“ Together with its world-wide affiliate organizations and partners, it provides standardized and scrutinized license texts, translation into languages and adaptations for various jurisdictions (presently over 50 adaptations are provided) . Creative Commons is never a party in the contract of such a license (other than in connection with materials for which it holds copyright itself) . ”

“ Remember, you can always reach out to the creator if you want to request extra permission beyond what the license allows.
Final Remarks
Attribution is arguably the single most important aspect of Creative Commons licensing. Think about why you want credit for your own work, even when it may not be legally required. What value does attribution provide to authors, and to the public who comes across the work online? ”

“ Within these activities, the policy distinguishes between (1) " [s] creen-resolution images of objects in the collection where a Creative Commons license is specified on the webpage [and] documents expressly produced for free and unrestricted public access in partnership with public bodies" and (2) those that are "high-resolution" and "available through the Science and Society Picture Library". ”

“ The CC BY license is the expression of a culture of respect and appropriate attribution, while "all rights reserved" is a ridiculous attempt to try to control things you cannot control and to ignore the fact that the rules of the copyright system and the rules of the research community are different. ”

“ Librarians who find themselves in the role of content creators may wonder how to license their work. Over 5,000 institutions in the United States use LibGuides as their preferred subject guide content management system, with over 120,000 license holders around the world. Licensing your resources under Creative Commons can be as simple as using the license chooser to create a machine-readable icon for your site or LibGuide. ”

“ The free software and open source software communities have inspired what is sometimes called ‘open content.’ Some copyright holders have made books, music, and other creative works available under licenses that give anyone permission to copy and make other uses of the works without specific permission or a royalty payment. Creative Commons hopes to build on the work of these pioneers by creating a menu of license provisions that people can combine to make their work available for copying and creative reuses (...) ”

“ My point here is that Creative Commons licenses or the tools of free and open source software—to which I will turn in a moment—represent something more than merely a second-best solution to a poorly chosen rule. ”

“ The CC0 license includes a brief “Statement of Purpose” explaining the licensor’s intent in adopting the license:
Certain owners wish to permanently relinquish those [copyright
and related] rights to a Work for the purpose of contributing to a commons of creative, cultural and scientific works (“Commons”) that the public can reliably and without fear of later claims of infringement build upon, modify, incorporate in other works, reuse and redistribute as freely as possible in any form whatsoever and for any purposes, including without limitation commercial purposes. ”

“ To choose a non-commercial license would mean that, e.g., an image in a CC BY-NC journal could not be re-used in a scholarly journal published by a commercial publisher. Course pack use of NC articles is also problematic if the university acts commercially and charges for the course. And let's not forget: commercial use can mean more impact for a work. CC BY also solves the problem of orphan (or semi-orphan) works. Some countries like Germany don’t have full copyright transfer to publishers. ”

“ In both situations, you need to consider what options you have for licensing the copyright you have in your adaptation; this is called the Adapter’s License. Remember that your rights in your adaptation only apply to your own contributions. The original license continues to govern the reuse of the elements from the original work that you used when creating your adaptation. ”

“ Individuals or organizations desiring to grant Open Access and defined community re-use of their creative works can do so by creating their own individual terms-of-use. For the copyright owner and license giver (licensor) , this may often appear to be the simplest and safest way to proceed. For re-users (licensees) , however, legal advice may be required to assess whether individual terms-of-use permit their intended use in their own jurisdiction. Not doing so carries the risk of unwitting copyright violations that may result in legal action. ”

“ The Internet has shown conclusively and visibly that—at least in certain sectors—we can have a global flowering of creativity, innovation, and information sharing in which intellectual property rights function in a very different way than under the standard model of proprietary control. In some cases, intellectual property rights were simply irrelevant—much of the information sharing and indexing on the Web falls within this category. In some cases they were used to prevent exclusivity. Think of Creative Commons or the General Public License. ”

“ But what if you simply want to sell a CC-licensed work?
If you are the creator, then selling your work is always okay. In fact, selling physical copies (e. g., a textbook) and providing digital copies for free is a very common method for making money while using CC licenses.
Figure 4.8 highlights Cards Against Humanity, a card game available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. Cards Against Humanity offers their cards decks online for free download but sells physical copies. ”

“ Over the course of Creative Commons’ history, to our knowledge, there have been very few legal disputes and decisions involving CC legal tools. Each court that has rendered a decision has made it without questioning the enforceability of the CC license at issue. ”

“ However, all the initial declarations on open access, to which I will turn shortly, also specify the lowering of permission barriers as a crucial part of OA. Open licenses are structures that sit on top of copyright and under which the author uses his or her legal intellectual property rights explicitly to allow others to redistribute and, in some cases, modify the work in question. In almost every case this retains the demand for attribution. The most commonly implemented licenses to achieve libre open access are the Creative Commons licenses, covered below in Chapter 3. ”

“ While other custom open copyright licenses have been developed in the past, we recommend using Creative Commons licenses because they are up-to-date, free to use, and have been broadly adopted by governments, institutions, and individuals as the global standard for open copyright licenses. ”

“ Creative Commons is not a party to this License, and makes no warranty whatsoever in connection with the Work. Creative Commons will not be liable to You or any party on any legal theory for any damages whatsoever, including without limitation any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising in connection to this license. Notwithstanding the foregoing two (2) sentences, if Creative Commons has expressly identified itself as the Licensor hereunder, it shall have all rights and obligations of Licensor. ”