Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creative works and knowledge through their CC licenses. CC licenses allow work to be reused without permission when certain conditions are fulfilled. CC licenses have been found to be legally valid in many jurisdictions and countries.
Creators can add CC licenses to their work to share it and make it more available to view and use. Creators can select the license based on how they want others to use, share, or create derivatives of their work. They only need to add their license, which can be a statement (e.g., CC BY-SA 4.0) or a CC label to their work.
CC licenses do not take away a copyright or its protections, and only a copyright holder can add a CC license to a work.
In This Guide
Related Research Guide
Content credit for this page: Images (LibGuide). By Lauri Rebar. https://libguides.fau.edu/images-boca/creativecommons
Wikimedia Foundation (2017, February). What is Creative Commons? [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/dPZTh2NKTm4
Using Creative Commons (CC) Licenses and Works
Copyright and Creative Commons for Artists
Seemel, G. (2013). The new kind of copyright [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/86555594
Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians by
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).
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