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University of Minnesota

Kathryn A. Martin Library

Scholarly Publishing

What you need to know about journal impacts, acceptance rates, peer-review status, UMD's institutional repository, and who is citing whom.

Why Creative Commons?

Why do we need Creative Commons?

  • Do you use information you find online?
  • Do you share what you create?
  • Do you share your research?
  • Do you share your artwork?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you need to know more about Creative Commons Licenses and Copyright.

Creative Commons & Copyright

License

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Kiwi by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand (CC BY) license. The video was made with support from InternetNZ and is a project of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Produced by Mohawk Media. Please link to this page when providing attribution.

Types of Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons offers 6 types of Licenses.  More information about the licenses here. 

Attribution

Attribution 
CC BY

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

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Attribution & Share Alike

Attribution-ShareAlike 
CC BY-SA

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

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Attribution No Derivative Distribution

Attribution-NoDerivs 
CC BY-ND

This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you.

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Attribution, Non Commercial

Attribution-NonCommercial 
CC BY-NC

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

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Attribution, Non Commericial, Share Alike

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 
CC BY-NC-SA

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

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Attribution, Non-Commerical, No Derivatives

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 
CC BY-NC-ND

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

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Public Domain

Creative Commons also provides tools that work in the “all rights granted” space of the public domain.

 CC0  No Rights Reserved

The CC0 tool  "enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database."

PDM  No Known Copyright

The Public Domain Mark  " enables works that are no longer restricted by copyright to be marked as such in a standard and simple way, making them easily discoverable and available to others."