Creative Commons unplugged/The CC licenses

CC licenses utilise four terms (with standard abbreviations and identifying symbols) to represent four aspects of copyright which a creator may choose to apply to a creative work. These four terms are combined in various ways to create a number of separate licenses.

All of the CC licenses require attribution (or credit) to the author or creator of the work.

In addition, all of the CC licenses may have one or more of the following permissions or restrictions:

What are the different licensing combinations?
Copyright holders may choose which permissions or restrictions they want to apply by combining these licensing terms to generate one of six CC licenses, described below.

Note: The Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) and Attribution Share-Alike (CC BY-SA) are Free Cultural Works approved license options. The "Free Cultural Works approved" logo signifies that these licenses meet the requirements of the free cultural works definition derived from the essential freedoms. Significant open content projects like WikiEducator, Wikipedia (including the sister projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation) and Connexions use free cultural works licenses.

Test your knowledge: choose a license
The Creative Commons website provides a free online tool which you may use to license your work. The tool is designed to generate information about a particular license and the code to display the license on a website. We make use of this tool in the following practice activity.

CC public domain tools
While CC licenses help authors keep and manage their copyright on terms they choose, Creative Commons also provides other tools that work in the “all rights granted” space of the public domain. The public domain refers to creative works which are not protected by intellectual property rights at all and available for use by all members of the public. Works enter the public domain when the intellectual property rights have expired or the creator donates work to the public domain by forfeiting all intellectual property rights. Because copyright law is different from country to country, the recognition and meaning of the public domain will vary across national boundaries. Some countries may limit the use of public domain works or may not acknowledge public domain works at all. To learn more, refer to Copyright for Educators.

CC public domain tools enable authors and copyright owners who want to dedicate their works to the worldwide public domain to do so, and facilitate the labeling and discovery of works that are already free of known copyright restrictions. Note that the public domain is not a license, but a dedication by the authors to waive intellectual property rights on the work.

The CC0 tool allows creators to waive all rights and place a work in the public domain. The Creative Commons website provides a Public Domain Deed for this purpose. The CC0 tool should not be used for marking existing works in the public domain.

The Public Domain Mark allows any web user to “mark” a work (that is already in the public domain) as being in the public domain.

(Insert activity using each tool here.)

Acknowledgements
Content on this page was sourced, revised and remixed from:
 * http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/
 * http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/
 * CCLearn explanations, OER and CC licenses