Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons (CC) provides a simple, standardized way for you to share your educational creations while ensuring you retain your copyright. A Creative Commons license allows you to specify whether your work can be reused or adapted, and whether it can be used for commercial purposes. You can also choose to have anyone who adapts your work make their own adaptation available under the same license as yours (the share-alike component of a CC license).
Once you apply a Creative Commons license to your work, that license is irrevocable. The public can rely on that license forever, even if you stop distributing the work. The Creative Commons License Chooser at the Creative Commons website is an interactive tool to help you pick the right license for your work and generate the text for your copyright page. Our team can also help you.
Long Description for Choosing Your License
The decision tree for selecting a Creative Commons license is organized with a series of colored rectangles and arrows against a light cream background. The title reads “CHOOSING YOUR LICENSE.” The decision process begins with a large green box asking, “Do you own the copyright?” with branches for “No” leading to a red box labeled “STOP. Check ownership.” and “Yes” proceeding to the next query. The next decision point is “Allow commercial use?” with options leading to either a non-commercial branch or a commercial branch. Subsequent decision points include “Allow modifications?” with branches for “No,” “Yes,” and “Yes, but they must share alike.” Each decision point leads to a different colored license symbol: red for no modifications (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), orange for sharing-alike (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), yellow for non-commercial with attribution (CC BY-NC 4.0), green for commercial with attribution (CC BY 4.0), and light orange for commercial sharing-alike (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Remixing Materials
Some openly licensed works allow use, sharing, repurposing, and adapting. You can use those materials as long as you follow the license conditions. Not all Creative Commons licenses are compatible. If you want to combine two different Creative Commons licensed works in your own content, use the chart below to see whether the licenses on those works will allow them to be used together.
The Creative Commons Field Guide presentation on this page was created using Notebook LM, proofed and corrected by a human.
