Creative Commons license

A Creative Commons license (CC license) is one of several public copyright licenses produced by Creative Commons (CC), a U.S. non-profit corporation, that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work" for public good. 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. Initially released in 2002, 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 licenses were originally grounded in the American legal system, Creative Commons created jurisdiction ports to accommodate international laws.

In October 2014, the Open Knowledge Foundation approved the Creative Commons CC BY, CC BY-SA and CC0 licenses as conformant with the "Open Definition" for content and data.