Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. Our legal tools help those who want to encourage reuse of their works by offering them for use under generous, standardized terms; those who want to make creative uses of works; and those who want to benefit from this symbiosis. Our vision is to help others realize the full potential of the internet. CC has affiliates all over the world who help ensure our licenses work internationally and who raise awareness of our work.

Although Creative Commons is best known for its licenses, our work extends beyond just providing copyright licenses. CC offers other legal and technical tools that also facilitate sharing and discovery of creative works, such as CC0, a public domain dedication for rights holders who wish to put their work into the public domain before the expiration of copyright, and the Public Domain Mark, a tool for marking a work that is in the worldwide public domain. Creative Commons licenses and tools were designed specifically to work with the web, which makes content that is offered under their terms easy to search for, discover, and use.

For more information about CC, our main website contains in-depth information about the organization, its staff and board of directors, its history, and its supporters. You can also read CC case studies to learn about some of the inspiring ways CC licenses and tools have been used to share works and support innovative business models. You can find regularly updated information about CC by visiting the blog.

Copyright grants to creators a bundle of exclusive rights over their creative works, which generally include, at a minimum, the right to reproduce, distribute, display, and make adaptations. The phrase “All Rights Reserved” is often used by owners to indicate that they reserve all of the rights granted to them under the law. When copyright expires, the work enters the public domain, and the rights holder can no longer stop others from engaging in those activities under copyright, with the exception of moral rights reserved to creators in some jurisdictions. Creative Commons licenses offer creators a spectrum of choices between retaining all rights and relinquishing all rights (public domain), an approach we call “Some Rights Reserved.”

Creative Commons licenses provide an easy way to manage the copyright terms that attach automatically to all creative material under copyright. Our licenses allow that material to be shared and reused under terms that are flexible and legally sound. Creative Commons offers a core suite of six copyright licenses. Because there is no single “Creative Commons license,” it is important to identify which of the six licenses you are applying to your material, which of the six licenses has been applied to material that you intend to use, and in both cases the specific version.

All of our licenses require that users provide attribution (BY) to the creator when the material is used and shared. Some licensors choose the BY license, which requires attribution to the creator as the only condition to reuse of the material. The other five licenses combine BY with one or more of three additional license elements: NonCommercial (NC), which prohibits commercial use of the material; NoDerivatives (ND), which prohibits the sharing of adaptations of the material; and ShareAlike (SA), which requires adaptations of the material be released under the same license.

CC licenses may be applied to any type of work, including educational resources, music, photographs, databases, government and public sector information, and many other types of material. The only categories of works for which CC does not recommend its licenses are computer software and hardware. You should also not apply Creative Commons licenses to works that are no longer protected by copyright or are otherwise in the public domain. Instead, for those works in the worldwide public domain, we recommend that you mark them with the Public Domain Mark.

In November 2013, Creative Commons published the version 4.0 license suite. These licenses are the most up-to-date licenses offered by CC, and are recommended over all prior versions. You can see how the licenses have been improved over time on the license versions page. 4.0 has been drafted to be internationally valid, and will have official translations becoming available after publication.

If you are unsure which license best suits your needs, there are plenty of resources to help rights holders choose the right CC license. CC Australia has developed a flow chart that may be useful in helping you settle on the right license for your work. Creative Commons has also compiled a list of examples that demonstrate how various licenses fit into licensors’ overall strategies. You can also read case studies of others who are using CC licenses. The CC community can also respond to questions, and may have already addressed issues you raise. The CC community email discussion lists and discussion archives may be useful resources.

Finally, you may also want to consult with a lawyer to obtain advice on the best license for your needs.

The latest version of the Creative Commons licenses is version 4.0. You should always use the latest version of the Creative Commons licenses in order to take advantage of the many improvements described on the license versions page. In particular, 4.0 is meant to be better suited to international use, and use in many different contexts, including sharing data.

Creators and other rights holders may wish to check with their collecting society before applying a CC license to their material. Many rights holders who are members of a collecting society can waive the right to collect royalties for uses allowed under the license, but only to the extent their societies allow.

Collecting societies in several countries including Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain, Taiwan, and the Netherlands take an assignment of rights from creators in present and future works and manage them, so that the societies effectively become the owner of these rights. (In France it is called a “mandate” of rights but has similar practical effect.) Creators in these jurisdictions who belong to collecting societies may not be able to license their material under CC licenses because the collecting societies own the necessary rights, not the creators. CC is working with several collecting societies and running pilot programs that allow creators to use CC licenses in some circumstances.

If you are already a member of a collecting society and want to use CC licenses, you are welcome to encourage your collecting society to give you the option of Creative Commons licensing.

Yes. One of our goals is to encourage creators and rights holders to experiment with new ways to promote and market their work. There are several possible ways of doing this.

CC’s NonCommercial (NC) licenses allow rights holders to maximize distribution while maintaining control of the commercialization of their works. If you want to reserve the right to commercialize your work, you may do this by choosing a license with the NC condition. If someone else wants to use your work commercially and you have applied an NC license to your work, they must first get your permission. As the rights holder, you may still sell your own work commercially.

You may also use funding models that do not depend on using an NC license. For example, many artists and creators use crowdfunding to fund their work before releasing it under a less restrictive license. Others use a “freemium” model where the basic content is free, but extras such as a physical printed version or special access to a members-only website are for paying customers only.

For more information and ideas, The Power of Open presents case studies of artists, businesspeople, and organizations who use CC.

Contact the rights holders to ask for permission. Otherwise, unless an exception or limitation to copyright applies, your use of the material may violate the Creative Commons license. If you violate the terms of the license, your rights to use the material will be automatically terminated, and you may be liable for copyright infringement.

You need to comply with the license terms if what you are doing would otherwise require permission from the rights holder. If your use would not require permission from the rights holder because it falls under an exception or limitation, such as fair use, or because the material has come into the public domain, the license does not apply, and you do not need to comply with its terms and conditions. Additionally, if you are using an excerpt small enough to be uncopyrightable, the license does not apply to your use, and you do not need to comply with its terms.

However, if you are using excerpts of CC-licensed material which individually are minimal and do not require license compliance, but together make up a significant copyrightable chunk, you must comply with the license terms. For example, if you quote many individual lines from a poem across several sections of a blog post, and your use is not a fair use, you must comply with the license even though no individual line would have been a substantial enough portion of the work to require this.