LibGuides: Faculty Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER): Creative Commons Licenses

What are Creative Commons Licenses?

Intro to Creative Commons video
Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians Book

This short video from Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand provides a brief overview of what Creative Commons (CC) is, and the different licenses that are available. Be aware that some resources mentioned are specific to New Zealand. The video is licensed under a CC-BY (attribution) license.

Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians by Creative Commons (Organization) Staff (Contribution by)
Call Number: KF3002 .C74 2020
ISBN: 9780838919460
Publication Date: 2019-12-17
The figures are eye-opening: more than 1.6 billion works on 9 million websites are licensed under Creative Commons (CC). These materials constitute an extraordinarily rich repository for teaching, learning, sharing, and creative reuse. Knowing your way around CC will help you make the most of the Open Access (OA) and open educational resources (OER) movements. This book represents the first-ever print complement to the CC Certificate program, providing in-depth coverage of CC licenses, open practices, and the ethos of the Commons. Inside readers will find guidance on the layers and elements of CC licenses, with clear explanations on how they interact; reusing, revising, and remixing; how to acknowledge the underlying work in a remix; techniques for locating works in the public domain and communicating their value; supporting learners' access to a wide array of open knowledge resources in primary, secondary, and higher education; assessing institutional policies for open education, plus advice on revising these policies; ways to adapt existing openly licensed materials in order to keep your institution's knowledge base relevant and up to date; how to meet the open licensing requirements increasingly present in government and foundation grants and contracts; and hundreds of authoritative resources for additional learning. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license; digital versions are available for download at Creative Commons web page Certificate Resources (CC BY).

Types of CC Licenses

Creative Commons is a free licensing system that allows the author of a work to specify how that work can be used by others. Even though the author retains full copyright, the Creative Commons (CC) license gives others the legal permission to copy and use the work. Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. The licenses apply on top of copyright, so you can modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs. Works held under a Creative Commons Licenses are indicated with a cc symbol. Additionally, CC works can have four other rights attached to the licenses that add or subtract certain permissions. These rights can be combined into six different Creative Commons Licenses.

See the Creative Commons FAQ Wikipedia page for more information:

Transcript for Creative Commons Licenses Graphic

Text taken from Open Education Resources at CCAC by Community College of Allegheny County Libraries, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Public Domain License and Mark

There is one additional creative commons license- known as the CC0 license, it notifies people that the work is in the public domain.

"CC0 license enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.

In contrast to CC’s licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether – the choice to opt out of copyright and database protection, and the exclusive rights automatically granted to creators – the “no rights reserved” alternative to our licenses." -Text taken from Creative Commons website