Creative Commons 101

Creative Commons 101
Image courtesy of Oregon State University Libraries

Authors of scholarly works generally want their works to be both widely available and widely read. Creative Commons licences can be useful tools for authors who wish to make their works openly available but also to put some conditions or limitations on how their works are to be used.

Suppose you have written something that you want to make available on the internet, perhaps through an institutional repository. Even after a work is posted to the internet, that work is still protected by copyright. The default position for copyright-protected material is that the copyright holder reserves all rights, subject only to the exceptions described in the Copyright ActCopyright Act.

By making your work available on the internet, you have taken a step to ensure your work is accessible to the world. But what if some of the readers of your work want to adapt or re-use it in some way? How would they obtain permission? What sort of re-use are you willing to permit? Some clear terms stating what uses the rights-holder will permit at no cost, including any restrictions or conditions on use, would be helpful to cover these situations.

Creative Commons licences are designed to serve this purpose. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that develops and provides free standardized licence agreements to promote and enable copyright-protected materials to be shared, adapted, and re-used. Given that Creative Commons has a number of licences that you, as an author/rights-holder, can choose to apply to your work, there are a few key elements you should consider that will help you select the most appropriate Creative Commons licence for your requirements.

As an author, you will likely want your work to be appropriately attributed to you in any subsequent use of that work. The Attribution (CC BY) license does not restrict the use of your work by other parties in any way, provided that you, as the author of the work, receive appropriate attribution. CC BY is the most basic of the CC licences, and its attribution requirement is included as one of the terms in the other licences to be discussed.

Since you are choosing to make your work available for use by others at no cost, you might want to ensure that others do not simply repackage your work and then sell it for profit. The Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) licence permits any use of the work provided that use is non-commercial, and again provided that you receive appropriate attribution.

Sometimes you might make a work available with the specific intent of encouraging modifications, updates, and adaptations of the work. The Share-Alike (CC BY-SA) licence permits any such modifications, updates, or adaptations to be made to the work, but only provided that those modifications, updates, and adaptations are also made generally available under a comparable licence, and again provided that you receive appropriate attribution.

There may be cases where you want to make your work widely available, but you have concerns that if the work is modified or adapted it might detract from the impact of the original work. In such cases, a No Derivatives (CC BY-ND) licence would permit any use of the work provided that it is used fully and as is, without any modifications or adaptations. It is important to note that if you are considering making your work available as an “open educational resource” (OER), any work made available as an OER must allow for derivative works, so this licence would not be an appropriate choice in such a case.

In addition to these four, there are two Creative Commons licences that allow rights-holders to combine the terms of non-commercial, no derivatives and share-alike, always along with attribution. These licences allow for combining non-commercial and no derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND), or for combining non-commercial with share-alike (CC BY-NC-SA). Further information about all of the available CC licences can be found here.

Once you have chosen the appropriate CC licence for a work, then all you have to do to have that licence apply to that work is to incorporate a statement or icon to identify the CC licence you have chosen. Icons for each CC licence and links to the licence terms are available here on the Creative Commons website. There is even some html code that includes the relevant icon and link that you can copy and paste to your web page, if you choose to do so. There are also details on how you can add the specific details of how you would like your work attributed.

What about prospective uses of your work that fall outside the scope of the CC licence you have chosen? A CC licence provides an immediate and clear set of permissions for the use of your work under certain terms and conditions, but there may be cases where someone wants to use your work for other purposes. For example, suppose you chose to put a CC BY-NC licence on your work, but then a commercial publisher decides it wants to include your work as part of a larger collection they are selling. As the rights-holder, you can still enter into such an arrangement, but it would be made separately between you and the prospective user, since the proposed use is outside the scope of the CC licence.

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For more information about copyright at the University of Alberta, check out the Copyright Office website or email our help desk at copyright@ualberta.ca.

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Adrian Sheppard — Director, Copyright Office

Adrian has been the Director of the University of Alberta’s Copyright Office since April 2015. One role of the Copyright Office is to educate and inform U of A students, faculty and staff on issues related to copyright. Adrian has an LL.B. from the University of Victoria.


Note: This post is intended to provide information and perspective about copyright issues, but should not be considered as legal advice.