5 Anatomy of a CC license
Comic Version
Now we know Creative Commons licenses developed out of the need to have an alternative to the all-rights-reserved default of copyright. CC licenses are an example of non-exclusive licenses, granting some of the rights usually reserved under copyright to the general public, as long as the user follows the rules of the license. They work entirely within the confines of copyright, and so works with CC licenses are also subject to the same copyright exceptions that their all rights reserved counterparts are.
While the images at the start of this section may be interpreted to suggest that CC licenses are customizable, that’s not the case. Creators are encouraged to use the 6 CC licenses exactly as they are to avoid confusion by the people who are using their works. They are encouraged to think about the individual license elements (BY, NC, SA, and ND), and what matters to them with respect to each. In fact, two of the elements cannot even be used with one another (SA and ND)!
To fully understand the license elements, let’s break them down with some examples.
- BY: This requires a reuser to give credit to the author of the original work credit (which is an example of the moral rights of an author). This is present in all the CC licenses.
- SA: This stands for “Share Alike”. It means that anyone who creates something new using the original work would have to apply a compatible license to the new work.
- NC: This stands for “Non-Commercial”. This requires that users cannot use the work for commercial purposes. Put simply, they can’t make money off their use of the work. This is a condition that is sometimes confusing, because it is the use of the work that has to be non-commercial, not the actor. For example, a for profit entity can use a work with an NC licensed if their use is not making money, but a non-profit organization could not use an NC licensed work in a fundraising capacity. It is also not always clear how far “commercial” goes (ex. Does ad revenue from a website count as commercial use?), and so if you are unsure, it is best not to use the NC licensed work.
- ND: This stands for “No Derivatives”. This means that the work needs to be kept whole, with no new works created from it. This too can be a little confusing, because as of Version 4.0, all CC licenses, even the NoDerivatives licenses, allow anyone to make an adaptation of a CC licensed work. The difference between the ND licenses and the other licenses is that if an adaptation of an ND-licensed work has been created, it cannot be shared with others. This allows, for example, an individual user to create adaptations of an ND licensed work. But ND does not allow the individual to share adaptations with the public (4.4 Remixing CC licensed work by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0.).
From the images at the start of this section, we can see that CC licenses are effectively a non-exclusive license granted to anyone who is using the work, and there are three l