Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved. [link]

History
Creative Commons was founded in 2001

Founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, CC is led by a Board of Directors that includes cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig, MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson, lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert Eric Saltzman, renowned documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, and noted Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito.

Creative Commons’ first project
In December 2002, Creative Commons released its first set of copyright licenses for free to the public. Creative Commons developed its licenses — inspired in part by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) — alongside a Web application platform to help you license your works freely for certain uses, on certain conditions; or dedicate your works to the public domain.

In the years following the initial release, Creative Commons and its licenses have grown at an exponential rate around the world. The licenses have been further improved, and ported to over 45 international jurisdictions.

LICENSES AVAILABLE [link]
Attribution
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

View License Deed | Legal Code

Attribution Share Alike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

View License Deed | Legal Code

Attribution No Derivatives
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 | Legal Code

Attribution Non-Commercial
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 | Legal Code

Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
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. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

View License Deed | Legal Code

Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

View License Deed | Legal Code

F.A.Q.s
Does my use constitute a derivative work or an adaptation?
It depends. A derivative work is a work that is based on another work but is not an exact, verbatim copy. What this precisely means is a difficult legal question. In general, a translation from one language to another or a film version of a book are examples of derivative works. Under Creative Commons’ core licenses, syncing music in timed-relation with a moving image is also considered to be a derivative work.

All Creative Commons licenses allow the user to exercise the rights permitted under the license in any format or media. This means, for example, that under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported license you can copy the work from a digital file to a print file, as long as you do so in a manner that is consistent with the terms of that license. [link]

Can CC give me permission to use a CC-licensed work that I found?
No. Creative Commons licenses are offered free of charge to the public. There is no registration required to use a CC license, nor do we attempt to maintain any type of registry. We generally have no direct knowledge of who is using the licenses or even for what (though we do have some indirect knowledge of usage via various search engines). We have no way of contacting the authors of CC-licensed works, nor do we offer any rights clearing services.

CC licenses haven't been ported to my jurisdiction (country). What can I do?
Every CC license is intended to be effective on a worldwide basis, whether "ported" to a specific jurisdiction or not. If the licenses have not yet been ported to your jurisdiction, we recommend that you simply use the Unported versions of our licenses. CC's Unported licenses were created using standard terms from the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and other international treaties related to copyright and intellectual property.

If you would like to help adapt the licenses to your jurisdiction, you might consider collaborating with us on the license porting process: International Overview The Porting Process. If you would like to contribute to this project, please contact Creative Commons International: info@creativecommons.org.

Can I license software using CC licenses?
They do not recommend it. Creative Commons licenses should not be used for software. CC strongly encourages you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed at the Open Source Initiative. Unlike our licenses, which do not make mention of source or object code, these existing licenses were designed specifically for use with software.

Creative Commons has “wrapped” some free software/open source licenses with a human-readable "Commons Deed" and machine-readable metadata. You may use these "wrapped" software licenses to take advantage of the Creative Commons human-readable document as well as the machine-readable metadata while still licensing your work under an established software license. It is important to note that CC has not altered these software licenses in any way, but has simply bundled human- and machine-readable explanations of the licenses along with the original license text. Examples: GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, BSD.

Jurisdiction
completed licenses are available in the following countries :

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China Mainland, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK: England and Wales, UK: Scotland, United States.

The process of developing licenses and discussing them are still in progress for the following jurisdictions:

Armenia, Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Georgia, Ireland, Jordan, Nigeria, Thailand, Ukraine.

More Info
CC's generic licenses are jurisdiction-agnostic: they do not mention any particular jurisdiction's laws or statutes or contain any sort of choice-of-law provision. The licenses are, however, based on the U.S. Copyright Act in many respects. This means that, though we have no reason to believe that the licenses would not function in legal systems across the world, it is at least conceivable that some aspects of our licenses will not align perfectly to a particular jurisdiction's laws. [link]

Our licensing model includes three levels: the human-readable Commons Deed, the lawyer-readable Legal Code, and the machine-readable Digital Code or metadata. The International Commons project will port the Legal Code to accommodate a specific jurisdiction's legal background rules, while the Commons Deed and Digital Code will remain the same.

After the ported licenses are launched, CCi continues to collaborate with the international affiliates to maintain the legal framework and to adapt later versions of the licenses. In this way, CCi works to maintain an international license architecture and a network of legal experts around the globe.

Download CC buttons/logos Here - [link]

LICENSE YOUR WORK/S HERE - [link]

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hope you learned something new

xoxo,
shryne