Creative Commons licenses

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001.

All of the main licenses grant certain baseline rights, such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work without changes, at no charge. The rest of the license depends on the version, and comprises a selection of four conditions:

Attribution (by): Permit others to copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based upon it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.

Noncommercial or NonCommercial (nc): Permit others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works based upon it only for noncommercial purposes.

No Derivative Works or NoDerivs (nd): Permit others to copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based upon it.

ShareAlike (sa): Permit others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. (See also copyleft.)

Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "nd" and "sa" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses, which is equivalent to releasing one's work into the public domain. The five of the eleven valid licenses that lack the Attribution element have been phased out because 98% of licensors requested Attribution, but are still available for viewing on the website ^[1]. There are thus six regularly used licenses:

Attribution alone (by)
Attribution + Noncommercial (by-nc)
Attribution + NoDerivs (by-nd)
Attribution + ShareAlike (by-sa)
Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)
Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike (by-nc-sa)

There are also three Sampling licenses and a Developing Nations license, which are more restrictive than the main licenses and were introduced later.

Creative Commons licenses are currently available in 34 different jurisdictions worldwide, with nine others under development. ^[2]

1 Other licenses
2 Criticisms
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Other licenses

Creative Commons also offers a number of "special" licenses which are more restrictive than the main licenses and were introduced later, as well as an easy way to release material into the public domain. The special licenses are:

Sampling licenses, with three options:
- Sampling - parts of the work can be used for any purpose other than advertising, but the whole work can't be copied or modified
- Sampling Plus - parts of the work can be copied and modified for any purpose other than advertising, and the entire work can be copied for noncommercial purposes
- Noncommercial Sampling Plus - the whole work or parts of the work can be copied and modified for noncommercial purposes
A Developing Nations license, which only applies to countries deemed by the World Bank as a "non-high-income economy". Full copyright restrictions apply to people in other countries.

[edit] Criticisms

None of the Creative Commons licenses have been certified by the Open Source Initiative. The maintainers of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution do not believe that even the Creative Commons Attribution License, the least restrictive of the licenses, adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines due to the license's anti-DRM provisions and its requirement in section 4a that downstream users remove an author's credit upon request from the author.^[3] As the other licenses are identical to the Creative Commons Attribution License with further restrictions, Debian considers them non-free for the same reasons. The Free Software Foundation (and other organizations, such as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia) accepts the licenses for creative works other than software and software documentation, provided the "nc" and "nd" options are not used, but recommends the Free Art license over any form of Creative Commons Licenses, citing the commonly used but overly vague statement "I use a Creative Commons license" , without noting the actual license.^[4] Richard Stallman has also criticised the newer licenses for not allowing the freedom to copy the work for noncommercial purposes, and has said he no longer supports Creative Commons as an organisation, as the licenses no longer all have this freedom in common^[5].