3.5: Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons provides a set of free tools to help you legally share your knowledge and creativity. Creative Commons licenses have become the international standard for open licensing creative works. In this subunit we learn how Creative Commons licenses work.
Upon successful completion of this subunit, you will be able to:
- explain how creativity builds on the past;
- understand how Creative Commons uses copyright law to provide permissions to copy, distribute, modify and share creative works;
- describe the application of the components of the six Creative Commons licenses;
- identify the three layers of a Creative Commons license, namely the legal code, the license deed and the machine readable code; and
- explain the compatibility among different license types when remixing materials.
Traditional “all rights reserved” copyright restricts our access to the creative outputs of the past. However, imagine a world where we stop reinventing the wheel and build on the past for a better future. In a digital world, Creative Commons licenses refine copyright for creating digital futures while expanding the shared commons.
Lawrence Lessig, a leading pioneer and founding board member of Creative Commons, suggests giving the creators of knowledge and culture the freedom to create. This means using copyright to give permissions to create. In this learning pathway we will explore how this works. It’s legal, and it’s free!
Creative Commons (CC) enables creators to share creative works legally by providing a number of copyright licenses and tools that creators may use to grant the public specific permissions on how to use their works.
If you own the exclusive rights to a property, as the owner you may decide how that property is used. For example, you may give permission to someone to use your car or to stay in your house. In the case of copyright, the owner holds the exclusive rights to copy, distribute and adapt an original creative work, including the economic rights associated with the work. Similarly, a copyright holder may give permissions regarding these rights. Creative Commons provides the legal tools that help authors manage their intellectual property rights and permissions associated with their creative works.
The Creative Commons Kiwi video developed for Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand and produced by Mohawk Media provides an excellent overview of the Creative Commons license elements.
- Have you ever wondered how to download and share digital content legally?
- How do you let people know that you want them to reuse your own work?
This video will show you how. It provides a valuable frame of reference before we study the detail of the license elements.
CC[1] licenses utilise four terms (with standard abbreviations and identifying symbols) to represent four aspects of copyright which a creator may choose to apply to a creative work. These four terms are combined in various ways to create a number of separate licenses.
All of the CC licenses require attribution (or credit) to the author or creator of the work.
A CC[1] license is composed of three distinct layers.
- Legal Code – Each license begins as a traditional legal tool, in the kind of language and text formats that most lawyers know and love. This is the actual license, which is a detailed legal document.
- Commons Deed – This is a handy reference that summarizes and expresses some of the most important terms and conditions. Think of the Commons Deed as a user-friendly interface to the Legal Code beneath, although the Deed itself is not a license, and its contents are not part of the Legal Code itself.
- Machine-readable version – The final layer of the license design is a “machine-readable” version of the license – a summary of the key freedoms and obligations written into a format that software systems, search engines, and other kinds of technology can understand.
The ability to remix, adapt or re-purpose materials is a significant advantage of open educational resources (OER) when compared to closed learning materials. Remix refers to the ability to combine different resources together to create new derivative works. Creators of OER often combine learning materials from a variety of sources together, or add their own creativity to existing works to create a new educational resource which they in turn re-license openly. However, the legal terms of one license may not be compatible with the legal terms of another license.
We need to consider the compatibility of different licenses when remixing materials, that is creating a derivative work. Note that license compatibility applies when creating derivative works. Reusing materials without adaptation (such as copying or redistributing verbatim) is easy with Creative Commons as long as you comply with the original license conditions.
As in many areas of academic study, the devil is in the detail. In this section we consider a number of interesting but important questions related to Creative Commons licenses. The purpose of this section is for learners to familiarize themselves with credible online sources that can be consulted to find answers regarding the implementation of Creative Commons licensed works.
We will introduce two useful sources: the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Creative Commons web site, and the legal code of the individual licenses. We encourage learners to annotate, share and discuss these resource pages using hypothes.is.
Creative Commons is the legal framework for open educational resources (OER) which makes the OER movement possible. It provides the legal and technical tools which educators and institutions use to share knowledge freely, building on a culture of permissions as opposed to restrictions. In summary:
- Creative Commons works in tandem with copyright law to provide educators alternatives to refine their copyright by transforming the default position of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved” according to permissions determined by the creator of the work.
- Creative Commons provides six license alternatives based on the permissions for derivative works and whether or not commercial use is allowed.
- Creative Commons provides public domain tools which allow copyright holders to place their works into the public domain or to mark a work that is already in the public domain as such.
- The Creative Commons website provides a free online tool to choose a license for a creative work.
- CC[1] licenses are user-friendly and appropriate for the digital world, as they are available in three different formats: the full legal terms, the license summary (deed), and “machine-readable” code.
- With CC licenses, users know in advance which material can be revised, remixed and redistributed as derivative works, according to compatibility for re-licensing among different licenses.
