A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses 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 releas ...

, 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 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 a ...

approved the Creative Commons CC BY, CC BY-SA and CC0 licenses as conformant with the " Open Definition" for content and data.licenses
on opendefinition.comCreative Commons 4.0 BY and BY-SA licenses approved conformant with the Open Definition
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 to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. Juri ...

, 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 des ...

". 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 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 ...

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, educatio ...

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 u ...

, argued for the more open proliferation of their software's use for two primary reasons: the moral obligation of

altruism Altruism is the moral principle, principle and moral courage, moral practice of concern for the welfare and/or happiness of other human kind, human beings or animals, resulting in a quality of life both material and spirituality, spiritual. It ...

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, pri ...

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 ref ...

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 software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

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 sour ...

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 t ...

" license model; examples are The White Chamber, Mari0 or Assault Cube. Despite the status of CC0 as the most free copyright license, the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 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 under copyleft ("s ...

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 intere ...

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, o