![Cc](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Cc.logo.circle.svg)
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several
public copyright license
A public license or public copyright licenses is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees.
By applying a public license to a work, pro ...
s that enable the free distribution of an otherwise
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
ed "work".
[A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics to a song, or a photograph of almost anything are all examples of "works".] A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
There are several types of Creative Commons licenses. Each license differs by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002, by
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
, a U.S.
non-profit
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
corporation founded in 2001. There have also been five versions of the suite of licenses, numbered 1.0 through 4.0. Released in November 2013, the 4.0 license suite is the most current. While the Creative Commons license was originally grounded in the American legal system, there are now several
Creative Commons jurisdiction ports
Creative Commons (abbreviated "CC"), since 2011, has created many "ports", or adaptions, of its licenses to make them compatible with the copyright legislation of various countries worldwide.
However, more recently, CC has been recommending a ...
which accommodate international laws.
In October 2014, the
Open Knowledge Foundation
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England an ...
approved the Creative Commons CC BY, CC BY-SA and CC0 licenses as conformant with the "
Open Definition
The Open Definition is a document published by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) (previously Open Knowledge International) to define openness in relation to data and content. It specifies what licences for such material may and may not stipula ...
" for content and data.
[licenses](_blank)
on opendefinition.com[Creative Commons 4.0 BY and BY-SA licenses approved conformant with the Open Definition](_blank)
by Timothy Vollmer on creativecommons.org (December 27th, 2013)
History and international use
Lawrence Lessig
Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard ...
and
Eric Eldred designed the Creative Commons License (CCL) in 2001 because they saw a need for a license between the existing modes of copyright and
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work
A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...
status. Version 1.0 of the licenses was officially released on 16 December 2002.
Origins
The CCL allows inventors to keep the rights to their innovations while also allowing for some external use of the invention.
The CCL emerged as a reaction to the decision in ''
Eldred v. Ashcroft
''Eldred v. Ashcroft'', 537 U.S. 186 (2003), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). The practical result of this was to prevent a number ...
'', in which the
United States Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
ruled constitutional provisions of the
Copyright Term Extension Act
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act – also known as the Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or (derisively) the Mickey Mouse Protection Act – extended copyright terms in the United States in 1998. It is one of several a ...
that extended the copyright term of works to be the last living author's lifespan plus an additional 70 years.
License porting
The original non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal system in mind; therefore, the wording may be incompatible with local legislation in other
jurisdictions
Jurisdiction (from Latin 'law' + 'declaration') is the legal term for the legal authority granted to a legal entity to enact justice. In federations like the United States, areas of jurisdiction apply to local, state, and federal levels.
Jur ...
, rendering the licenses unenforceable there. To address this issue, Creative Commons asked its affiliates to translate the various licenses to reflect local laws in a process called "
porting
In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...
". As of July 2011, Creative Commons licenses have been ported to over 50 jurisdictions worldwide.
Chinese use of the Creative Commons license
Working with Creative Commons, the Chinese government adapted the Creative Commons License to the Chinese context, replacing the individual monetary compensation of U.S. copyright law with incentives to Chinese innovators to innovate as a social contribution. In China, the resources of society are thought to enable an individual's innovations; the continued betterment of society serves as its own reward.
Chinese law heavily prioritizes the eventual contributions that an invention will have towards society's growth, resulting in initial laws placing limits on the length of patents and very stringent conditions regarding the use and qualifications of inventions.
"Info-communism"
An idea sometimes called "info-communism" found traction in the
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to the various nations and state (polity), states in the regions of Europe, North America, and Oceania. after researchers at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...
grew frustrated over having aspects of their code withheld from the public.
Modern
copyright law
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
roots itself in motivating innovation through rewarding innovators for socially valuable inventions. Western
patent law
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...
assumes that (1) there is a right to use an invention for commerce and (2) it is up to the patentee's discretion to limit that right.
The MIT researchers, led by
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...
, argued for the more open proliferation of their software's use for two primary reasons: the moral obligation of
altruism
Altruism is the principle and moral practice of concern for the welfare and/or happiness of other human beings or animals, resulting in a quality of life both material and spiritual. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures and a core as ...
and collaboration, and the unfairness of restricting the freedoms of other users by depriving them of non-
scarce
In economics, scarcity "refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good. ...
resources.
As a result, they developed the
General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...
(GPL), a precursor to the Creative Commons License based on existing American copyright and patent law.
The GPL allowed the economy around a piece of software to remain
capitalist
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, priva ...
by allowing programmers to commercialize products that use the software, but also ensured that no single person had complete and exclusive rights to the usage of an innovation.
Since then, info-communism has gained traction, with some scholars arguing in 2014 that
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
itself is a manifestation of the info-communist movement.
Applicable works
Work licensed under a Creative Commons license is governed by applicable copyright law. This allows Creative Commons licenses to be applied to all work falling under copyright, including: books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, and websites.
Software
While
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
is also governed by copyright law and CC licenses are applicable, the CC recommends against using it in software specifically due to backward-compatibility limitations with existing commonly used software licenses. Instead, developers may resort to use more software-friendly
free and open-source software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
(FOSS)
software license
A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source ...
s. Outside the FOSS licensing use case for software there are
several usage examples to utilize CC licenses to specify a "
Freeware
Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...
" license model; examples are
The White Chamber
The White Chamber, stylized as the white chamber, is a science fiction adventure game created by Studio Trophis using the Wintermute Engine. Originally designed as a university project, it was expanded to a full game and released for Micro ...
,
Mari0
''Mari0'' (pronounced "mari-zero" or "Mario") is a 2012 side-scrolling platform video game developed by German indie developer Maurice Guégan and released onto his website Stabyourself.net. It combines gameplay elements from Nintendo's ''Super M ...
or
Assault Cube
''AssaultCube'', formerly ''ActionCube'', is an open source first-person shooter video game, based on ''Cube'' and use the same engine, the ''Cube Engine''. Although the main focus of ''AssaultCube'' is multiplayer online gaming, a single-player ...
.
Despite the status of CC0 as the most free copyright license, the
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...
does not recommend releasing
software into the public domain using the CC0.
However, application of a Creative Commons license may not modify the rights allowed by
fair use
Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests ...
or fair dealing or exert restrictions which violate copyright exceptions. Furthermore, Creative Commons licenses are non-exclusive and non-revocable. Any work or copies of the work obtained under a Creative Commons license may continue to be used under that license.
When works are protected by more than one Creative Commons license, the user may choose any of them.
Preconditions
The author, or the licensor in case the author did a contractual transfer of rights, need to have the exclusive rights on the work. If the work has already been published under a public license, it can be uploaded by any third party, once more on another platform, by using a compatible license, and making reference and attribution to the original license (e.g. by referring the URL of the original license).
Consequences
The license is non-exclusive, royalty-free, and unrestricted in terms of territory and duration, so it is irrevocable, unless a new license is granted by the author after the work has been significantly modified. Any use of the work that is not covered by other copyright rules triggers the public license. Upon activation of the license, the licensee must adhere to all conditions of the license, otherwise the license agreement is illegitimate, and the licensee would commit a copyright infringement. The author, or the licensor as a proxy, has the legal rights to act upon any copyright infringement. The licensee has a limited period to correct any non-compliance.
Types of licenses
Four rights
The CC licenses all grant "baseline rights", such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work worldwide for non-commercial purposes and without modification. In addition, different versions of license prescribe different rights, as shown in this table:
The last two clauses are not
free content licenses, according to definitions such as
DFSG
The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) is a set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a free software license, which in turn is used to determine whether a piece of software can be included in De ...
or the
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...
's standards, and cannot be used in contexts that require these freedoms, such as
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
. For
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
, Creative Commons includes three free licenses created by other institutions: the
BSD License
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...
, the
GNU
GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...
LGPL
The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...
, and the
GNU
GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...
GPL
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
.
Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses and five are not. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "nd" and "sa" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses. Of the eleven valid combinations, the five that lack the "by" clause have been retired because 98% of licensors requested attribution, though they do remain available for reference on the website.
This leaves six regularly used licenses plus the CC0
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work
A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...
declaration.
Six regularly used licenses
The six licenses in most frequent use are shown in the following table. Among them, those accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation – the public domain dedication and two attribution (BY and BY-SA) licenses – allow the sharing and remixing (creating
derivative works
In copyright law
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a litera ...
), including for commercial use, so long as attribution is given.
Zero / public domain
![Cc-public_domain_mark_white](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Cc-public_domain_mark_white.svg)
Besides copyright licenses, Creative Commons also offers CC0, a tool for relinquishing copyright and releasing material into the
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work
A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...
.
CC0 is a legal tool for
waiving as many rights as legally possible.
Or, when not legally possible, CC0 acts as fallback as
public domain equivalent license
Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license co ...
.
Development of CC0 began in 2007 and it was released in 2009. A major target of the license was the scientific data community.
In 2010, Creative Commons announced its
Public Domain Mark
Public Domain Mark (PDM) is a symbol used to indicate that a work is free of known copyright restrictions and therefore in the public domain. It is analogous to the copyright symbol, which is commonly used to indicate that a work is copyrighted, ...
, a tool for labeling works already in the public domain. Together, CC0 and the Public Domain Mark replace the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, which took a U.S.-centric approach and co-mingled distinct operations.
In 2011, the
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...
added CC0 to its
free software licenses
A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) ...
. However, the
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...
currently does not recommend using CC0 to release
software into the public domain because it lacks a patent grant.
In February 2012, CC0 was submitted to
Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. It is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation,_with_501(c)(3).html" ;"title="110. - 6910./ref> is a type o ...
(OSI) for their approval. However, controversy arose over its clause which excluded from the scope of the license any relevant patents held by the copyright holder. This clause was added with scientific data in mind rather than software, but some members of the OSI believed it could weaken users' defenses against
software patent
A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, libraries, user interface, or algorithm.
Background
A patent is a set of exclusionary rights granted by a state to a patent holder for a limited period of time, u ...
s. As a result, Creative Commons withdrew their submission, and the license is not currently approved by the OSI.
From 2013 to 2017, the
stock photography
Stock photography is the supply of photographs which are often licensed for specific uses. The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in the 1920s, has established models including traditional macrostock photography, midstock photography, ...
website
Unsplash
Unsplash is a website dedicated to proprietary stock photography. Since 2021, it has been owned by Getty Images. The website claims over 265,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 16 billion photo impressions per month on their g ...
used the CC0 license, distributing several million free photos a month.
Lawrence Lessig
Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard ...
, the founder of Creative Commons, has contributed to the site. Unsplash moved from using the CC0 license to a custom license in June 2017 and to an explicitly
nonfree license in January 2018.
In October 2014, the
Open Knowledge Foundation
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England an ...
approved the Creative Commons CC0 as conformant with the
Open Definition
The Open Definition is a document published by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) (previously Open Knowledge International) to define openness in relation to data and content. It specifies what licences for such material may and may not stipula ...
and recommend the license to dedicate content to the public domain.
In July 2022
Fedora Linux
Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of open-source technologies. Fedora is the upstream sourc ...
disallowed software licensed under CC0 due to patent rights not being waived under the license.
Retired licenses
Due to either disuse or criticism, a number of previously offered Creative Commons licenses have since been retired,
and are no longer recommended for new works. The retired licenses include all licenses lacking the Attribution element other than CC0, as well as the following four licenses:
* Developing Nations License: a license which only applies to
developing countries
A developing country is a sovereign state with a lesser developed industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is also no clear agreem ...
deemed to be "non-high-income economies" by the
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Interna ...
. Full copyright restrictions apply to people in other countries.
* Sampling: parts of the work can be used for any purpose other than advertising, but the whole work cannot 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 non-commercial purposes
Version 4.0
The latest version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses, released on November 25, 2013, are generic licenses that are applicable to most jurisdictions and do not usually require ports. No new ports have been implemented in version 4.0 of the license. Version 4.0 discourages using ported versions and instead acts as a single global license.
Rights and obligations
Attribution
Since 2004, all current licenses other than the CC0 variant require attribution of the original author, as signified by the BY component (as in the preposition "by").
The attribution must be given to "the best of
ne'sability using the information available". Creative Commons suggests the mnemonic "TASL": ''title'' -- ''author -- source''
eb link--
C''licence''.
Generally this implies the following:
* Include any copyright notices (if applicable). If the work itself contains any copyright notices placed there by the copyright holder, those notices must be left intact, or reproduced in a way that is reasonable to the medium in which the work is being re-published.
* Cite the author's name, screen name, or user ID, etc. If the work is being published on the Internet, it is nice to link that name to the person's profile page, if such a page exists.
* Cite the work's title or name (if applicable), if such a thing exists. If the work is being published on the Internet, it is nice to link the name or title directly to the original work.
* Cite the specific CC license the work is under. If the work is being published on the Internet, it is nice if the license citation links to the license on the CC website.
* Mention if the work is a derivative work or adaptation. In addition to the above, one needs to identify that their work is a derivative work, e.g., "This is a Finnish translation of
riginal workby
uthor" or "Screenplay based on
riginal workby
uthor"
Non-commercial licenses
The "non-commercial" option included in some Creative Commons licenses is controversial in definition, as it is sometimes unclear what can be considered a non-commercial setting, and application, since its restrictions differ from the principles of
open content promoted by other
permissive license
A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, ...
s. In 2014
Wikimedia Deutschland
Wikimedia chapters are national or sub-national not-for-profit organizations created to promote the interests of Wikimedia projects locally. Chapters are legally independent of the Wikimedia Foundation, entering into an agreement with the founda ...
published a guide to using Creative Commons licenses as
wiki pages for translations and as PDF.
Adaptability
![Derivative of medical imaging](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Derivative_of_medical_imaging.jpg)
Rights in an adaptation can be expressed by a CC license that is compatible with the status or licensing of the original work or works on which the adaptation is based.
Legal aspects
The legal implications of large numbers of works having Creative Commons licensing are difficult to predict, and there is speculation that media creators often lack insight to be able to choose the license which best meets their intent in applying it.
Some works licensed using Creative Commons licenses have been involved in several court cases. Creative Commons itself was not a party to any of these cases; they only involved licensors or licensees of Creative Commons licenses. When the cases went as far as decisions by judges (that is, they were not dismissed for lack of jurisdiction or were not settled privately out of court), they have all validated the legal robustness of Creative Commons public licenses.
Dutch tabloid
In early 2006, podcaster
Adam Curry
Adam Clark Curry (born September 3, 1964) is an American podcaster, announcer, Internet entrepreneur and media personality, known for his stint as a VJ on MTV and being one of the first celebrities to personally create and administer Web sites. ...
sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos from Curry's Flickr page without Curry's permission. The photos were licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. While the verdict was in favor of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to him as long as they did not repeat the offense. Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, main creator of the Dutch CC license and director of the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, commented, "The Dutch Court's decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and binds users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge of, the conditions of the license."
Virgin Mobile
In 2007,
Virgin Mobile Australia
Virgin Mobile is a wireless communications brand used by seven independent brand-licensees worldwide. Virgin Mobile branded wireless communications services are available in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Colombia, Chile, Kuwait, Saudi Ara ...
launched an advertising campaign promoting their cellphone text messaging service using the work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to
Flickr
Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional ...
using a Creative Commons-BY (Attribution) license. Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation required. Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing a URL leading to the photographer's Flickr page on each of their ads. However, one picture, depicting 15-year-old Alison Chang at a fund-raising carwash for her church,
caused some controversy when she sued Virgin Mobile. The photo was taken by Alison's church youth counselor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under the Creative Commons license.
In 2008, the case (concerning
personality rights
Personality rights, sometimes referred to as the right of publicity, are rights for an individual to control the commercial use of their identity, such as name, image, likeness, or other unequivocal identifiers. They are generally considered as ...
rather than copyright as such) was thrown out of a Texas court for lack of jurisdiction.
SGAE vs Fernández
In the fall of 2006, the
collecting society
Copyrights can either be licensed or assigned by the owner of the copyright. A copyright collective (also known as a copyright society, copyright collecting agency, licensing agency or copyright collecting society or collective management organiz ...
Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (
SGAE
The Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers (''Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, SGAE'') is the main collecting society for songwriters, composers and music publishers in Spain. It is similar to AGADU, ASCAP, GEMA, SADAIC, SACEM and SAYC ...
) in Spain sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, owner of a disco bar located in
Badajoz
Badajoz (; formerly written ''Badajos'' in English) is the capital of the Province of Badajoz in the autonomous community of Extremadura, Spain. It is situated close to the Portuguese border, on the left bank of the river Guadiana. The population ...
who played CC-licensed music. SGAE argued that Fernández should pay royalties for public performance of the music between November 2002 and August 2005. The Lower Court rejected the collecting society's claims because the owner of the bar proved that the music he was using was not managed by the society.
In February 2006, the Cultural Association Ladinamo (based in Madrid, and represented by
Javier de la Cueva
Javier de la Cueva (Madrid, 1962), is a lawyer specialized in issues related to technology and the Internet. He graduated in Law and is Doctor in Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid. He has defended numerous cases involving the us ...
) was granted the use of copyleft music in their public activities. The sentence said:
''GateHouse Media, Inc. v. That's Great News, LLC''
On June 30, 2010,
GateHouse Media filed a lawsuit against
That's Great News That's may refer to:
* ''"That's"'', a brand name used on recordable media by Taiyo Yuden and its subsidiary ''That's Fukushima Co., Ltd.''
* Several English-language listings magazines in the People's Republic of China
**''That's Beijing''
**''Tha ...
. GateHouse Media owns a number of local newspapers, including ''
Rockford Register Star
The ''Rockford Register Star'' is the primary daily newspaper of the Rockford, Illinois, metropolitan area. The fifth-highest circulation newspaper in Illinois, the Register Star takes its name from the 1979 merger of two predecessors, the ''Re ...
'', which is based in Rockford, Illinois. That's Great News makes plaques out of newspaper articles and sells them to the people featured in the articles.
GateHouse sued That's Great News for copyright infringement and breach of contract. GateHouse claimed that TGN violated the non-commercial and no-derivative works restrictions on GateHouse Creative Commons licensed work when TGN published the material on its website. The case was settled on August 17, 2010, though the settlement was not made public.
''Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group, LLC''
The plaintiff was photographer Art Drauglis, who uploaded several pictures to the photo-sharing website Flickr using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-SA), including one entitled "Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD.". The defendant was Kappa Map Group, a map-making company, which downloaded the image and used it in a compilation entitled "Montgomery Co. Maryland Street Atlas". Though there was nothing on the cover that indicated the origin of the picture, the text "''Photo: Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD Photographer: Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis, Creative Commoms'' '', CC-BY-SA-2.0''" appeared at the bottom of the back cover.
The validity of the CC BY-SA 2.0 as a license was not in dispute. The CC BY-SA 2.0 requires that the licensee to use nothing less restrictive than the CC BY-SA 2.0 terms. The atlas was sold commercially and not for free reuse by others. The dispute was whether Drauglis' license terms that would apply to "derivative works" applied to the entire atlas. Drauglis sued the defendants in June 2014 for copyright infringement and license breach, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, fees, and costs. Drauglis asserted, among other things, that Kappa Map Group "exceeded the scope of the License because defendant did not publish the Atlas under a license with the same or similar terms as those under which the Photograph was originally licensed." The judge dismissed the case on that count, ruling that the atlas was not a
derivative work
In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of an original, previously created first work (the underlying work). The derivative work becomes a second, separate work independent in fo ...
of the photograph in the sense of the license, but rather a
collective work
A collective work is a work that contains the works of several authors assembled and published under the direction of one natural or legal person who owns the copyright in the work as a whole.
Definitions vary considerably from one country to an ...
. Since the atlas was not a derivative work of the photograph, Kappa Map Group did not need to license the entire atlas under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license. The judge also determined that the work had been properly attributed.
In particular, the judge determined that it was sufficient to credit the author of the photo as prominently as authors of similar authorship (such as the authors of individual maps contained in the book) and that the name "CC-BY-SA-2.0" is sufficiently precise to locate the correct license on the internet and can be considered a valid URI of the license.
Verband zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums im Internet (VGSE)
In July 2016, German computer magazine
LinuxUser
''LinuxUser'' is a German computer magazine for Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Lin ...
reported that a German blogger Christoph Langner used two licensed photographs from Berlin photographer Dennis Skley on his private blog Linuxundich. Langner duly mentioned the author and the license and added a link to the original. Langner was later contacted by the ''Verband zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums im Internet'' (VGSE) (Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property in the Internet) with a demand for €2300 for failing to provide the full name of the work, the full name of the author, the license text, and a source link, as is required by the fine print in the license. Of this sum, €40 goes to the photographer, and the remainder is retained by VGSE.
[
][See also: ] The Higher Regional Court of Köln dismissed the claim in May 2019.
Works with a Creative Commons license
![Staeofthecommons2017-o](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Staeofthecommons2017-o.svg)
Creative Commons maintains a content directory
wiki
A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...
of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines (see
Creative Commons-licensed content directories
Creative Commons is maintaining a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be acc ...
).
Unicode symbols
After being proposed by Creative Commons in 2017, Creative Commons license symbols were added to
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
with version 13.0 in 2020.
The circle with an equal sign (meaning ''no derivatives'') is present in older versions of Unicode, unlike all the other symbols.
These symbols can be used in succession to indicate a particular Creative Commons license, for example, ''CC-BY-SA'' (CC-Attribution-ShareAlike) can be expressed with Unicode symbols
CIRCLED CC
,
CIRCLED HUMAN FIGURE
and
CIRCLED ANTICLOCKWISE ARROW
placed next to each other: 🅭🅯🄎
Case law database
In December2020, the Creative Commons organization launched an online database covering licensing case law and legal scholarship.
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See also
*
Free-culture movement
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, ...
*
Free music
Free music or libre music is music that, like free software, can freely be copied, distributed and modified for any purpose. Thus free music is either in the public domain or licensed under a free license by the artist or copyright holder themse ...
*
Free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
*
Non-commercial educational
A non-commercial educational station (NCE station) is a radio station or television station that does not accept on-air advertisements (TV ads or radio ads), as defined in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and was or ...
Notes
References
External links
*
Full selection of licenses* ''
Licenses
A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit).
A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...
''. Overview of free licenses. freedomdefined.org
''WHAT IS CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE'' – THE COMPLETE DEFINITIVE GUIDE
Web-friendly formatted summary of CC BY-SA 3.0
{{Subject bar, commons=yes, commons-search=Creative Commons, s=yes, s-search=Creative Commons, wikt=yes, v=yes, q=yes, d=yes
Computer law
Copyleft
Free content licenses
Intellectual property activism
Intellectual property law
Public copyright licenses
Articles containing video clips
Copyleft software licenses