The Creative Commons licenses relates to the name of several copyright licenses released on December 16, 2002. The licenses were released by Creative Commons, a United States nonprofit corporation. Everybody can put their own creations under these licenses.

There are four basic license conditions. A simple overview of these four:

• Attribution (BY): Allow others to copy, distribute, display and perform the work and evolved versions of it. They must give the original creator credit for the work.
• Noncommercial (NC): Allow others to copy, distribute, display and perform the work and evolved version of it. They are not allowed to make money with it.
• No Derivative Works (ND): Allow others to copy, distribute, display and perform the work. They are not allowed to change the work into something else.
• Share Alike (SA): Allow others to distribute evolved works only when they use the same license. See also copyleft.

It is possible to combine the license elements to allow people to use a work under certain conditions. For example, a combination of the first and fourth is called "CC BY-SA". This stands for "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike". With this license other people can use the work for free, but they must give credit to the original creator, and when they make something new with the work they must give it the same "CC BY-SA" license.

Criticism

The Free Software Foundation thinks that the Creative Commons system is confusing, because people often forget to tell which of the licenses they use. Instead they suggest to use the Free Art license.

Related pages

• Creative Commons
• Copyleft
• Free content