The Creative Story

The open licenses that you will learn about in this module are from Creative Commons (CC), a non-profit organization founded by Lawrence Lessig and others who believe in facilitating open exchange of intellectual work. These are not the only open licenses available but they are the most popular. If you are looking for OERs then you will almost certainly run into CC licenses.

There are six CC Licenses that allow authors/creators to keep the exclusive rights given to them by Copyright Law while passing along permissions for sharing with other users.

An Overview of CC Licenses

Creative Commons licenses are applied by the copyright owner to their own works. There are four components to these licenses that are arranged in six configurations. Each component places a particular restriction or requirement on the work:

BY - attribution required
NC - no commercial use
ND - no derivative works
SA - Share Alike - the license must be the same on any derivative works

The ND and SA components cannot be combined, as SA only applies to derivative works.

The six licenses (excluding CC-0 which is an equivalent to the Public Domain) are:

CC-BY
CC-BY-SA
CC-BY-ND
CC-BY-NC
CC-BY-NC-SA
CC-BY-NC-ND

The following chart illustrates the permissions allowed by each license:

Credit: This page is from an open course shared on Canvas Commons! It is shared under the CC-BY license. The content was developed by Amanda Gorrell at Alamo Colleges. I added the chart to the page (when modifying an OER, you should note the changes you made).