CC licenses are legally enforceable tools, but they were designed to be accessible and understandable to non-lawyers.
CC licenses use a three layer construction:
All CC licenses have some important features in common:
The differences between the CC licenses, then, depend on three additional permissions the creator would or would not like to grant:
The permissions options combine to provide six possible CC license choices. The six licenses, in order from least to most restrictive in terms of the freedoms granted reusers, are:
Although not considered CC licenses, Creative Commons also has two public domain tools with similar images to CC licenses that help represent the usability of a work in the public domain:
Because CC licenses are types of copyright licenses, these truths about copyright are also true of CC licenses:
As a general principle, whenever you are deciding how to apply your CC license, it is important to remember that CC licenses are designed with future users in mind. You want to make it easy for future users to understand what terms apply to their use of your work. Whenever you are applying a CC license, make your licensing statement easy to find and understand. Consider including additional information that a future user might need to provide good attribution to your work, such as the date of creation, your name, and a title for your work.
Simply applying a CC license to a creative work does not necessarily make it easy for others to reuse and remix it. Think about what technical format you are using for your content (e.g., PDF? MP3?). Can people download your work? Can they easily edit or remix it if the license allows? In addition to the final polished version, many creators distribute editable source files of their content to make it easier for those who want to use the work for their own purposes.
If you are using the work of others in your own work, you also have to give credit to those works in your own work.
When providing attribution, the recommended practice is to mark the work with full TASL information: Title, Author, Source, and License. When you don’t have some of the TASL information about a work, do the best you can and include as much detail as possible in the marking statement.
If your work is a modification or adaptation of another work, indicate this and provide attribution to the creator of the original work. You should also include a link to the work you modified and indicate what license applies to that work.
Creative Commons licenses are standardized licenses, which means the terms and conditions are the same for all works subject to the same type of CC license. This is an essential feature of their design. It also makes the licenses easy to understand and makes the works they're applied to easier to use appropriately. For this reason, CC discourages creators from customizing CC licenses. Any customizations to a CC license eliminate the ability to call it a CC license.
Unfortunately, there is not a "no bad actors" CC license. As long as users abide by license terms and conditions, creators cannot control how their material is used. That said, all CC licenses provide several mechanisms that allow licensors to choose not to be associated with their material, or to uses of their material with which they disagree.
1. All CC licenses prohibit using the attribution requirement to suggest that the licensor endorses or supports a particular use.
2. Licensors may waive the attribution requirement, choosing not to be identified as the licensor, if they wish.
3. If the licensor does not like how the material has been modified or used, CC licenses require that the licensee remove the attribution information upon request. (In 3.0 and earlier, this is only a requirement for adaptations and collections; in 4.0, this also applies to the unmodified work.)
4. Anyone modifying licensed material must indicate that the original has been modified. This ensures that changes made to the original material–whether or not the licensor approves of them–are not attributed back to the licensor.
5. Ultimately:
○ The Commons is full of good people who want to do the right thing, so we don’t often see much “abuse” of openly licensed works. Using CC licenses gives good, responsible people the freedom to use and build on your work.
○ Copyright and/or open copyright licenses doesn’t keep “bad” people from doing “bad” things with your work if they don’t care about copyright.
In addition to sources linked throughout the text, this guide drew information from "3.1 License Design and Terminology," "3.2 License Scope," "3.3 License Types," "4.1 Choosing and Applying a License," and "4.2 Things to Consider After CC Licensing" by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0.