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Creative Commons License




Many of the licences, notably all the original licences, grant certain "baseline rights", Baseline rights and restrictions in CC licenses such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work without changes, at no charge. Some of the newer licences do not grant these rights.

Creative Commons licenses are currently available in 34 different jurisdictions worldwide, with nine others under development. Creative Commons Worldwide


THE ORIGINAL LICENSES


The original set of licences all grant the "baseline rights". The details of each of these licences depends on the version, and comprises a selection of four conditions:

  • Attribution (by): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based upon it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.


  • Noncommercial or '''NonCommercial''' (nc): Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works based upon it only for Noncommercial purposes.


  • No Derivative Works or '''NoDerivs''' (nd): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based upon it.


  • '''.)


Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "nd" and "sa" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses, which is equivalent to releasing one's work into the Public Domain . The five of the eleven valid licenses that lack the Attribution element have been phased out because 98% of licensors requested Attribution, but are still available for viewing on the website. Creative Commons Licenses There are thus six regularly used licenses:
# Attribution alone (by)
# Attribution + Noncommercial (by-nc)
# Attribution + NoDerivs (by-nd)
# Attribution + ShareAlike (by-sa)
# Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)
# Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike (by-nc-sa)


OTHER LICENSES


A number of special licenses have been introduced, which are more specialized:

  • Sampling licenses, with two options:

  • ---Sampling Plus - parts of the work can be copied and modified for any purpose other than advertising, and the entire work can be copied for noncommercial purposes

  • ---Noncommercial Sampling Plus - the whole work or parts of the work can be copied and modified for noncommercial purposes


Besides licenses, Creative Commons also offers an easy way to release material into the Public Domain through the '' Public Domain Dedication '', as well as '' Founder's Copyright '', through which the work is released into the public domain after 14 or 28 years.


RETIRED LICENSES


Due to either disuse or criticism, a number of previously offered Creative Commons licenses has since been retired

  • Sampling – parts of the work can be used for any purpose other than advertising, but the whole work can't be copied or modified

  • DevNations – a Developing Nation s license, which only applies to countries deemed by the World Bank as a "non-high-income economy". Full copyright restrictions apply to people in other countries.



CRITICISM


Debian


The maintainers of Debian GNU/Linux , a Linux Distribution known for its adherence to Software Freedom , do not believe that even the Creative Commons Attribution License, the least restrictive of the licenses, adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines due to the license's anti- DRM provisions and its requirement in section 4a that downstream users remove an author's credit upon request from the author. debian-legal Summary of Creative Commons 2.0 Licenses by Evan Prodromou