Creative Commons

 

What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization that aims to increase the number of creative works that are available freely and legally for others to use and adopt in their work. Creative Commons developed a legal framework to protect the creative work licensed under one of the Creative Commons licenses from being plagiarized or used in a way that hurt the interest of the creator of the work.

The need for Creative Commons
Copyright laws are set to protect the work of authors from being disturbed, modified, or used without permission from the author or his/her representing agency, these laws are important to provide a safe environment for authors to publish their work without the fear of piracy or plagiarism, but the restrictive nature of copyright laws have prevented the authors from being able to share their works with other authors and to collaborate between each other, no laws were set to provide a cross between the safety of copyrights laws and the freedom some authors want for creative collaboration.
Creative Commons created a number of licenses that authors can use to communicate which rights are reserved and what is not, the sentence “Some rights reserved” creative commons use is different from the copyright “All rights reserved” and it explain the intent of creative commons.

Types of Creative Commons Licenses

  • Attribution (CC-BY): include an attribution for the original author.
  • Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA): you can use it to make a derivative work, but the derivative work should have the same license the original work has.
  • Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND): must include an attribution to author, and the work must not be modified.
  • Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC): must include an attribution to the author, and the work can only be used for noncommercial purposes.
  • Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA): must include an attribution to the author, the work can only be used for noncommercial purposes, and the derivative work should have the same license the original work has.
  • Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND): must include an attribution to the author, the work can only be used for noncommercial purposes, and the work must not be modified.

Legal status of Creative Commons
Creative Commons only protect copyrighted works, authors should always copyrights their work first, and then license their works under one of the Creative Commons licenses if they want, Creative Commons is not a substitution of copyright laws, but licensing a work under a creative commons license is binding and it cannot be reversed.

Works that can be protected under Creative Commons
Any creative work can be licensed under Creative Commons including music, pictures, videos animation, flash animation, articles any textual work, and many other types.
Creative Commons does not recommend the use of Creative Commons licenses for computer software, instead it recommends one of the open source licenses .