Ten Most Important FAQs

Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. Our legal tools help those who want to encourage reuse of their works by offering them for use under generous, standardized terms; those who want to make creative uses of works; and those who want to benefit from this symbiosis. Our vision is to help others realize the full potential of the internet. CC has affiliates all over the world who help ensure our licenses work internationally and who raise awareness of our work.

Although Creative Commons is best known for its licenses, our work extends beyond just providing copyright licenses. CC offers other legal and technical tools that also facilitate sharing and discovery of creative works, such as CC0, a public domain dedication for rights holders who wish to put their work into the public domain before the expiration of copyright, and the Public Domain Mark, a tool for marking a work that is in the worldwide public domain. Creative Commons licenses and tools were designed specifically to work with the web, which makes content that is offered under their terms easy to search for, discover, and use.

For more information about CC, our main website contains in-depth information about the organization, its staff and board of directors, its history, and its supporters. You can also read CC case studies to learn about some of the inspiring ways CC licenses and tools have been used to share works and support innovative business models. You can find regularly updated information about CC by visiting the blog.

Please support CC by making a donation through our support page. Donations can be handled through PayPal or by credit card. You can also support CC by visiting our store.

CC always welcomes your feedback, which you can provide by emailing info@creativecommons.org. You can also participate in CC’s email discussion lists and share feedback and ideas in one of those forums.

If you are a software developer, sysadmin, or have other technical expertise, please join our developer community and help build the tools that build the commons.

Finally, one of the best ways to support CC is by supporting our causes yourself. Follow our blog to find out about current issues where you can help get involved and spread the word, and advocate for free and open licensing in your own communities.

Creative Commons licenses provide an easy way to manage the copyright terms that attach automatically to all creative material under copyright. Our licenses allow that material to be shared and reused under terms that are flexible and legally sound. Creative Commons offers a core suite of six copyright licenses. Because there is no single “Creative Commons license,” it is important to identify which of the six licenses you are applying to your material, which of the six licenses has been applied to material that you intend to use, and in both cases the specific version.

All of our licenses require that users provide attribution (BY) to the creator when the material is used and shared. Some licensors choose the BY license, which requires attribution to the creator as the only condition to reuse of the material. The other five licenses combine BY with one or more of three additional license elements: NonCommercial (NC), which prohibits commercial use of the material; NoDerivatives (ND), which prohibits the sharing of adaptations of the material; and ShareAlike (SA), which requires adaptations of the material be released under the same license.

CC licenses may be applied to any type of work, including educational resources, music, photographs, databases, government and public sector information, and many other types of material. The only categories of works for which CC does not recommend its licenses are computer software and hardware. You should also not apply Creative Commons licenses to works that are no longer protected by copyright or are otherwise in the public domain. Instead, for those works in the worldwide public domain, we recommend that you mark them with the Public Domain Mark.

Although CC licenses get attached to tangible works (such as photos and novels), the license terms and conditions apply to the licensor’s copyright in the licensed material. The public is granted “permission to exercise” those rights in any medium or format. It is the expression that is protected by copyright and covered by the licenses, not any particular medium or format in which the expression is manifested. This means, for example, that a CC license applied to a digitized copy of a novel grants the public permission under copyright to use a print version of the same novel on the same terms and conditions (though you may have to purchase the print version from a bookstore).

CC licenses should not be applied to works in the worldwide public domain. All CC licenses are clear that they do not have the effect of placing restrictions on material that would otherwise be unrestricted, and you cannot remove a work from the public domain by applying a CC license to it. If you want to dedicate your own work to the public domain before the expiration of applicable copyright or similar rights, use CC’s legally robust public domain dedication. If a work is already in the worldwide public domain, you should mark it with CC’s Public Domain Mark.

Note that, in some cases, a work may be in the public domain under the copyright laws of some jurisdictions but not others. For example, U.S. government works are in the public domain under the copyright law of the United States, but may be protected by copyright laws in other jurisdictions. A CC license applied to such a work would be effective (and the license restrictions enforceable) in jurisdictions where copyright protection exists, but would not be operative if U.S. copyright law is determined to be the applicable law.

Creators may also apply Creative Commons licenses to material they create that are adapted from public domain works, or to remixed material, databases, or collections that include work in the public domain. However, in each of these instances, the license does not affect parts of the work that are unrestricted by copyright or similar rights. We strongly encourage you to mark the public domain material, so that others know they are also free to use this material without legal restriction.

Creators and other rights holders may wish to check with their collecting society before applying a CC license to their material. Many rights holders who are members of a collecting society can waive the right to collect royalties for uses allowed under the license, but only to the extent their societies allow.

Collecting societies in several countries including Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain, Taiwan, and the Netherlands take an assignment of rights from creators in present and future works and manage them, so that the societies effectively become the owner of these rights. (In France it is called a “mandate” of rights but has similar practical effect.) Creators in these jurisdictions who belong to collecting societies may not be able to license their material under CC licenses because the collecting societies own the necessary rights, not the creators. CC is working with several collecting societies and running pilot programs that allow creators to use CC licenses in some circumstances.

If you are already a member of a collecting society and want to use CC licenses, you are welcome to encourage your collecting society to give you the option of Creative Commons licensing.

The Creative Commons licenses have three layers, as does the CC0 public domain dedication: the human-readable deed, the lawyer-readable legal code, and the machine-readable metadata. The Public Domain Mark is not legally operative, and so has only two layers: the human-readable mark and machine-readable metadata.

When material is licensed using any of the CC licenses or tools, it is highly recommended that a CC button, text, or other marker somehow accompany it. There are many possible modes for marking. For our licenses, people generally use the CC license chooser to generate HTML code that can be pasted into the webpage where the licensed material is published. CC0 and the Public Domain Mark have a separate chooser. Many platforms and web services such as Flickr and Drupal support CC licensing directly, allowing you to select an appropriate license. The service then properly marks the work for you.

CC has published some best practices for marking your CC-licensed material, and recommends:

• Including a visual indicator (some combination of text and images) that the work is licensed with one of the CC licenses.
• Clearly indicating what material is covered under the CC license, especially if it’s presented alongside non-licensed materials.
• Including a link to the human-readable deed (which itself contains a link to the legal code).
• Embedding machine-readable metadata in the code of the license indicator or code of the licensed page.

See the marking page for more details.

Under version 4.0, if an NC license has been applied then any use of the licensed database or its contents that is restricted by copyright law or sui generis database rights requires compliance with the NC term, even if the database is not publicly shared. The other license elements (BY, ND, and SA, as applicable) must be complied with only if your use is so restricted and public sharing is involved. Learn more about how to comply when your use implicates copyright and/or sui generis database rights.

Prior CC license versions do not require compliance with the license restrictions or conditions when only sui generis database rights (and not copyright) are implicated. Please see below for more detail about how this works in the current and prior versions of the licenses.

With databases, there are likely four components to consider: (1) the database model or structure, (2) the data entry and output sheet, (3) field names, and (4) the data or other content.

The database model refers to how a database is structured and organized, including database tables and table indexes. The selection, coordination, and arrangement of the database is subject to copyright if it is sufficiently original. The originality threshold is fairly low in many jurisdictions. For example, while courts in the United States have held that an alphabetical telephone directory was insufficiently original to merit copyright protection, an organized directory of Chinese-American businesses in a particular area did. 1 These determinations are very fact-specific (no pun intended) and vary by jurisdiction.

The data entry and output sheets contain questions, and the answers to these questions are stored in a database. For example, a web page asking a scientist to enter a gene’s name, its pathway information, and its ontology would constitute a data entry sheet. The format and layout of these sheets are protected by copyright according to the same standard of originality used to determine if the database model is copyrightable.

Field names describe the contents or data. For example, “address” might be the name of the field for street address information. These are less likely to be protected by copyright because they often lack sufficient originality.

The data or other contents contained in the database are subject to copyright if they are sufficiently creative. Original poems contained in a database would be protected by copyright, but purely factual data (such as gene names or city populations) would not. Facts are not subject to copyright, nor are the ideas underlying copyrighted content.

The licenses grant permission for reuse in any situation that requires permission under copyright. There are many ways in which CC-licensed work works and even all rights reserved works can be reused without permission. This includes uses that are fair uses, for example.

If someone uses a CC-licensed work with any new or developing technology, and if copyright permission is required, then the CC license allows that use without the need to seek permission from the copyright owner so long as the license conditions are respected. This is one of the enduring qualities of our licenses — they have been carefully designed to work with all new technologies where copyright comes into play. No special or explicit permission regarding new technologies from a copyright perspective is required.