Creative Commons

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that provides model licenses and support for the open sharing of creative resources. This allows the creators of these resources to indicate how they may be used by others. Creative Commons licenses can be used alongside or in place of copyright.

Creative Commons licenses:

Creative Commons licenses permit a variety of levels of access and permission to distribute, alter, and reuse materials:

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 license offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND): This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

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.

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. It is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

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.

Attribution-NonCommericial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND): This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses. It only allows 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.

- Creative Commons.org

For additional information

Creative Commons Website

Creative Commons Research Guide (UNCG Libraries)

Search for Creative Commons images and other resources

Best practices for Citing Creative Commons resources