Creative Commons license

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A video explaining how Creative Commons licenses can be used in conjunction with commercial licensing arrangements

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". [lower-alpha 1] A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Contents

There are several types of Creative Commons licenses. Each license differs by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002, by Creative Commons, a U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001. There have also been five versions of the suite of licenses, numbered 1.0 through 4.0. [6] Released in November 2013, the 4.0 license suite is the most current. While the Creative Commons license was originally grounded in the American legal system, there are now several Creative Commons jurisdiction ports which accommodate international laws.

In October 2014, the Open Knowledge Foundation approved the Creative Commons CC BY, CC BY-SA and CC0 licenses as conformant with the "Open Definition" for content and data. [7] [8] [9]

History

Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig at the 2002 event for the first release of the licenses Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig.jpg
Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig at the 2002 event for the first release of the licenses

Lawrence Lessig and Eric Eldred designed the Creative Commons License (CCL) in 2001 because they saw a need for a license between the existing modes of copyright and public domain status. Version 1.0 of the licenses was officially released on 16 December 2002. [10]

Origins

The CCL allows inventors to keep the rights to their innovations while also allowing for some external use of the invention. [11] The CCL emerged as a reaction to the decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft , in which the United States Supreme Court ruled constitutional provisions of the Copyright Term Extension Act that extended the copyright term of works to be the last living author's lifespan plus an additional 70 years. [11]

License porting

The original non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal system in mind; therefore, the wording may be incompatible with local legislation in other jurisdictions, rendering the licenses unenforceable there. To address this issue, Creative Commons asked its affiliates to translate the various licenses to reflect local laws in a process called "porting". [12] As of July 2011, Creative Commons licenses have been ported to over 50 jurisdictions worldwide. [13]

International use

Chinese use of the Creative Commons license

Working with Creative Commons, the Chinese government adapted the Creative Commons License to the Chinese context, replacing the individual monetary compensation of U.S. copyright law with incentives to Chinese innovators to innovate as a social contribution. [14]

Applicable works

Wanna Work Together? animation by Creative Commons
The second version of the Mayer and Bettle promotional animation explaining Creative Commons with Jamendo as an example

Work licensed under a Creative Commons license is governed by applicable copyright law. [15] This allows Creative Commons licenses to be applied to all work falling under copyright, including: books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, and websites.

Software

While software is also governed by copyright law and CC licenses are applicable, the CC recommends against using it in software specifically due to backward-compatibility limitations with existing commonly used software licenses. [16] [17] Instead, developers may resort to use more software-friendly free and open-source software (FOSS) software licenses. Outside the FOSS licensing use case for software there are several usage examples to utilize CC licenses to specify a "Freeware" license model; examples are The White Chamber, Mari0 or Assault Cube. [18] Despite the status of CC0 as the most free copyright license, the Free Software Foundation does not recommend releasing software into the public domain using the CC0 due to patent concerns. [19]

However, application of a Creative Commons license may not modify the rights allowed by fair use or fair dealing or exert restrictions which violate copyright exceptions. [20] Furthermore, Creative Commons licenses are non-exclusive and non-revocable. [21] Any work or copies of the work obtained under a Creative Commons license may continue to be used under that license. [22]

When works are protected by more than one Creative Commons license, the user may choose any of them. [23]

Preconditions

The author, or the licensor in case the author did a contractual transfer of rights, needs to have the exclusive rights on the work. If the work has already been published under a public license, it can be uploaded by any third party, once more on another platform, by using a compatible license, and making reference and attribution to the original license (e.g. by referring the URL of the original license). [24]

Consequences

The license is non-exclusive, royalty-free, and unrestricted in terms of territory and duration, so it is irrevocable, unless a new license is granted by the author after the work has been significantly modified. Any use of the work that is not covered by other copyright rules triggers the public license. Upon activation of the license, the licensee must adhere to all conditions of the license, otherwise the license agreement is illegitimate, and the licensee would commit a copyright infringement. The author, or the licensor as a proxy, has the legal rights to act upon any copyright infringement. The licensee has a limited period to correct any non-compliance. [24]

Types of licenses

Creative commons license spectrum between public domain (top) and all rights reserved (bottom). Left side indicates the use-cases allowed, right side the license components. The dark green area indicates Free Cultural Works compatible licenses, the two green areas compatibility with the Remix culture. Creative commons license spectrum.svg
Creative commons license spectrum between public domain (top) and all rights reserved (bottom). Left side indicates the use-cases allowed, right side the license components. The dark green area indicates Free Cultural Works compatible licenses, the two green areas compatibility with the Remix culture.
CC license usage in 2014 (top and middle), "Free cultural works" compatible license usage 2010 to 2014 (bottom) Free-cultural-license-cc.svg
CC license usage in 2014 (top and middle), "Free cultural works" compatible license usage 2010 to 2014 (bottom)

Four rights

The CC licenses all grant "baseline rights", such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work worldwide for non-commercial purposes and without modification. [25] In addition, different versions of license prescribe different rights, as shown in this table: [26]

IconRightDescription
Cc-by new.svg Attribution (BY)Licensees may copy, distribute, display, perform and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits (attribution) in the manner specified by these. Since version 2.0, all Creative Commons licenses require attribution to the creator and include the BY element.
Cc-sa.svg Share-alike (SA)Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to ("not more restrictive than") the license that governs the original work. (See also Copyleft .) Without share-alike, derivative works might be sublicensed with compatible but more restrictive license clauses, e.g. CC BY to CC BY-NC.)
Cc-nc.svg Non-commercial (NC)Licensees may copy, distribute, display, perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes.
Cc-nd.svg No derivative works (ND)Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works and remixes based on it. Since version 4.0, derivative works are allowed but must not be shared.

The last two clauses are not free content licenses, according to definitions such as DFSG or the Free Software Foundation's standards, and cannot be used in contexts that require these freedoms, such as Wikipedia. For software, Creative Commons includes three free licenses created by other institutions: the BSD License, the GNU LGPL, and the GNU GPL. [27]

Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses and five are not. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "ND" and "SA" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses. Of the eleven valid combinations, the five that lack the "BY" clause have been retired because 98% of licensors requested attribution, though they do remain available for reference on the website. [28] [29] [30] This leaves six regularly used licenses plus the CC0 public domain declaration.

Six regularly used licenses

The six licenses in most frequent use are shown in the following table. Among them, those accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation – the public domain dedication and two attribution (BY and BY-SA) licenses – allow the sharing and remixing (creating derivative works), including for commercial use, so long as attribution is given. [30] [31] [32]

License nameAbbreviationIcon Attribution requiredAllows remix culture Allows commercial useAllows Free Cultural Works Meets the OKF 'Open Definition'
AttributionCC BY CC-BY icon.svg YesYesYesYesYes
Attribution-ShareAlikeCC BY-SA CC BY-SA icon.svg YesYesYesYesYes
Attribution-NonCommercialCC BY-NC Cc-by-nc icon.svg YesYesNoNoNo
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlikeCC BY-NC-SA Cc-by-nc-sa icon.svg YesYesNoNoNo
Attribution-NoDerivativesCC BY-ND Cc-by-nd icon.svg YesNoYesNoNo
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativesCC BY-NC-ND Cc-by-nc-nd icon.svg YesNoNoNoNo

Zero / public domain

Tool nameAbbreviationIcon Attribution requiredAllows remix culture Allows commercial useAllows Free Cultural Works Meets the OKF 'Open Definition'
"No Rights Reserved"CC0 CC0 button.svg NoYesYesYesYes
CC zero public domain dedication tool logo Cc-zero.svg
CC zero public domain dedication tool logo
Creative Commons Public Domain Mark. Indicates works which have already fallen into (or were given to) the public domain. Cc-public domain mark white.svg
Creative Commons Public Domain Mark. Indicates works which have already fallen into (or were given to) the public domain.

Besides copyright licenses, Creative Commons also offers CC0, a tool for relinquishing copyright and releasing material into the public domain. [32] CC0 is a legal tool for waiving as many rights as legally possible. [34] Or, when not legally possible, CC0 acts as fallback as public domain equivalent license. [34] Development of CC0 began in 2007 [35] and it was released in 2009. [36] [37] A major target of the license was the scientific data community. [38]

In 2010, Creative Commons announced its Public Domain Mark, [39] a tool for labeling works already in the public domain. Together, CC0 and the Public Domain Mark replace the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, [40] which took a U.S.-centric approach and co-mingled distinct operations.

In 2011, the Free Software Foundation added CC0 to its free software licenses. However, the Free Software Foundation currently does not recommend using CC0 to release software into the public domain because it explicitly does not grant a patent license. [19]

In February 2012, CC0 was submitted to Open Source Initiative (OSI) for their approval. [41] However, controversy arose over its clause which excluded from the scope of the license any relevant patents held by the copyright holder. This clause was added with scientific data in mind rather than software, but some members of the OSI believed it could weaken users' defenses against software patents. As a result, Creative Commons withdrew their submission, and the license is not currently approved by the OSI. [38] [42]

From 2013 to 2017, the stock photography website Unsplash used the CC0 license, [43] [44] distributing several million free photos a month. [45] Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, has contributed to the site. [46] Unsplash moved from using the CC0 license to a custom license in June 2017 [47] and to an explicitly nonfree license in January 2018.

In October 2014, the Open Knowledge Foundation approved the Creative Commons CC0 as conformant with the Open Definition and recommend the license to dedicate content to the public domain. [8] [9]

In July 2022 Fedora Linux disallowed software licensed under CC0 due to patent rights explicitly not being waived under the license. [48]

Retired licenses

Due to either disuse or criticism, a number of previously offered Creative Commons licenses have since been retired, [28] [49] and are no longer recommended for new works. The retired licenses include all licenses lacking the Attribution element other than CC0, as well as the following four licenses:

Version 4.0

The latest version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses, released on November 25, 2013, are generic licenses that are applicable to most jurisdictions and do not usually require ports. [54] [55] [56] [57] No new ports have been implemented in version 4.0 of the license. [58] Version 4.0 discourages using ported versions and instead acts as a single global license. [59]

Rights and obligations

Attribution

Since 2004, all current licenses other than the CC0 variant require attribution of the original author, as signified by the BY component (as in the preposition "by"). [29] The attribution must be given to "the best of [one's] ability using the information available". [60] Creative Commons suggests the mnemonic "TASL": title – author – source [web link] – [CC] licence.
Generally this implies the following:

Non-commercial licenses

The NonCommercial license allows image creators to restrict selling and profiting from their works by other parties and thus maintaining free of charge access to images.

The "non-commercial" option included in some Creative Commons licenses is controversial in definition, [61] as it is sometimes unclear what can be considered a non-commercial setting, and application, since its restrictions differ from the principles of open content promoted by other permissive licenses. [62] In 2014 Wikimedia Deutschland published a guide to using Creative Commons licenses as wiki pages for translations and as PDF. [24]

Adaptability

An example of a permitted combination of two works, one being CC BY-SA and the other being public domain Derivative of medical imaging.jpg
An example of a permitted combination of two works, one being CC BY-SA and the other being public domain

Rights in an adaptation can be expressed by a CC license that is compatible with the status or licensing of the original work or works on which the adaptation is based. [63]

License compatibility chart for combining or mixing two CC licensed works [64] [65]
Public Domain Mark button.svg
CC0 button.svg 		CC-BY icon.svg CC BY-SA icon.svg Cc-by-nc icon.svg
Cc-by-nc-sa icon.svg 		Cc-by-nd icon.svg
Cc-by-nc-nd icon.svg
Public Domain Mark button.svg
CC0 button.svg 		Yes check.svgYes check.svgYes check.svgYes check.svgDark Red x.svg
CC-BY icon.svg Yes check.svgYes check.svgYes check.svgYes check.svgDark Red x.svg
CC BY-SA icon.svg Yes check.svgYes check.svgYes check.svgDark Red x.svgDark Red x.svg
Cc-by-nc icon.svg
Cc-by-nc-sa icon.svg 		Yes check.svgYes check.svgDark Red x.svgYes check.svgDark Red x.svg
Cc-by-nd icon.svg
Cc-by-nc-nd icon.svg 		Dark Red x.svgDark Red x.svgDark Red x.svgDark Red x.svgDark Red x.svg

The legal implications of large numbers of works having Creative Commons licensing are difficult to predict, and there is speculation that media creators often lack insight to be able to choose the license which best meets their intent in applying it. [66]

Some works licensed using Creative Commons licenses have been involved in several court cases. [67] Creative Commons itself was not a party to any of these cases; they only involved licensors or licensees of Creative Commons licenses. When the cases went as far as decisions by judges (that is, they were not dismissed for lack of jurisdiction or were not settled privately out of court), they have all validated the legal robustness of Creative Commons public licenses.

Dutch tabloid

In early 2006, podcaster Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos from Curry's Flickr page without Curry's permission. The photos were licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. While the verdict was in favor of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to him as long as they did not repeat the offense. Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, main creator of the Dutch CC license and director of the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, commented, "The Dutch Court's decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and binds users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge of, the conditions of the license." [68] [69] [70] [71]

Virgin Mobile

In 2007, Virgin Mobile Australia launched an advertising campaign promoting their cellphone text messaging service using the work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to Flickr using a Creative Commons-BY (Attribution) license. Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation required. Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing a URL leading to the photographer's Flickr page on each of their ads. However, one picture, depicting 15-year-old Alison Chang at a fund-raising carwash for her church, [72] caused some controversy when she sued Virgin Mobile. The photo was taken by Alison's church youth counselor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under the Creative Commons license. [72] In 2008, the case (concerning personality rights rather than copyright as such) was thrown out of a Texas court for lack of jurisdiction. [73] [74]

SGAE vs Fernández

In the fall of 2006, the collecting society Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) in Spain sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, owner of a disco bar located in Badajoz who played CC-licensed music. SGAE argued that Fernández should pay royalties for public performance of the music between November 2002 and August 2005. The Lower Court rejected the collecting society's claims because the owner of the bar proved that the music he was using was not managed by the society. [75]

In February 2006, the Cultural Association Ladinamo (based in Madrid, and represented by Javier de la Cueva) was granted the use of copyleft music in their public activities. The sentence said:

Admitting the existence of music equipment, a joint evaluation of the evidence practiced, this court is convinced that the defendant prevents communication of works whose management is entrusted to the plaintiff [SGAE], using a repertoire of authors who have not assigned the exploitation of their rights to the SGAE, having at its disposal a database for that purpose and so it is manifested both by the legal representative of the Association and by Manuela Villa Acosta, in charge of the cultural programming of the association, which is compatible with the alternative character of the Association and its integration in the movement called 'copy left'. [76]

GateHouse Media, Inc. v. That's Great News, LLC

On June 30, 2010, GateHouse Media filed a lawsuit against That's Great News. GateHouse Media owns a number of local newspapers, including Rockford Register Star , which is based in Rockford, Illinois. That's Great News makes plaques out of newspaper articles and sells them to the people featured in the articles. [77] GateHouse sued That's Great News for copyright infringement and breach of contract. GateHouse claimed that TGN violated the non-commercial and no-derivative works restrictions on GateHouse Creative Commons licensed work when TGN published the material on its website. The case was settled on August 17, 2010, though the settlement was not made public. [77] [78]

Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group, LLC

In 2007, photographer Art Drauglis uploaded several pictures to the photo-sharing website Flickr, giving them the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-SA). One photo, titled "Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD.", was downloaded by Kappa Map Group, a map-making company, and published in 2012 on the front cover of Montgomery Co. Maryland Street Atlas. The text "Photo: Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD Photographer: Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis, Creative Commoms [ sic ], CC-BY-SA-2.0" was placed on the back cover, but nothing on the front indicated authorship.

The validity of the CC BY-SA 2.0 as a license was not in dispute. The CC BY-SA 2.0 requires that the licensee to use nothing less restrictive than the CC BY-SA 2.0 terms. The atlas was sold commercially and not for free reuse by others. The dispute was whether Drauglis' license terms that would apply to "derivative works" applied to the entire atlas. Drauglis sued the defendants in June 2014 for copyright infringement and license breach, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, fees, and costs. Drauglis asserted, among other things, that Kappa Map Group "exceeded the scope of the License because defendant did not publish the Atlas under a license with the same or similar terms as those under which the Photograph was originally licensed." [79] The judge dismissed the case on that count, ruling that the atlas was not a derivative work of the photograph in the sense of the license, but rather a collective work. Since the atlas was not a derivative work of the photograph, Kappa Map Group did not need to license the entire atlas under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license. The judge also determined that the work had been properly attributed. [80]

In particular, the judge determined that it was sufficient to credit the author of the photo as prominently as authors of similar authorship (such as the authors of individual maps contained in the book) and that the name "CC-BY-SA-2.0" is sufficiently precise to locate the correct license on the internet and can be considered a valid identifier for the license. [81]

Verband zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums im Internet (VGSE)

In July 2016, German computer magazine LinuxUser reported that a German blogger Christoph Langner used two CC BY-licensed photographs from Berlin photographer Dennis Skley on his private blog Linuxundich. Langner duly mentioned the author and the license and added a link to the original. Langner was later contacted by the Verband zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums im Internet (VGSE) (Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property in the Internet) with a demand for €2300 for failing to provide the full name of the work, the full name of the author, the license text, and a source link, as is required by the fine print in the license. Of this sum, €40 goes to the photographer, and the remainder is retained by VGSE. [82] [83] The Higher Regional Court of Cologne dismissed the claim in May 2019. [84]

Works with a Creative Commons license

Number of Creative Commons licensed works as of 2017, per State of the Commons report Stateofthecommons2017-o.svg
Number of Creative Commons licensed works as of 2017, per State of the Commons report

Creative Commons maintains a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. [85] On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. [86] CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines.

Unicode symbols

After being proposed by Creative Commons in 2017, [87] Creative Commons license symbols were added to Unicode with version 13.0 in 2020. [88] The circle with an equal sign (meaning no derivatives) is present in older versions of Unicode, unlike all the other symbols.

NameUnicode Decimal UTF-8 ImageDisplayed
Circled Equals

meaning no derivatives

U+229C⊜E2 8A 9C
Cc-nd.svg
⊜
Circled Zero With Slash

meaning no rights reserved

U+1F10D🄍F0 9F 84 8D
Cc-zero.svg
🄍
Circled Anticlockwise Arrow

meaning share alike

U+1F10E🄎F0 9F 84 8E
Cc-sa.svg
🄎
Circled Dollar Sign With Overlaid Backslash

meaning non commercial

U+1F10F🄏F0 9F 84 8F
Cc-nc.svg
🄏
Circled CC

meaning Creative Commons license

U+1F16D🅭F0 9F 85 AD
Cc.logo.circle.svg
🅭
Circled C With Overlaid Backslash

meaning public domain

U+1F16E🅮F0 9F 85 AE
Cc-public domain mark.svg
🅮
Circled Human Figure

meaning attribution, credit

U+1F16F🅯F0 9F 85 AF
Cc-by new.svg
🅯

These symbols can be used in succession to indicate a particular Creative Commons license, for example, CC-BY-SA (CC-Attribution-ShareAlike) can be expressed with Unicode symbols CIRCLED CC, CIRCLED HUMAN FIGURE and CIRCLED ANTICLOCKWISE ARROW placed next to each other: 🅭🅯🄎

Case law database

In December 2020, the Creative Commons organization launched an online database covering licensing case law and legal scholarship. [89] [90]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song and its lyrics, or a photograph of almost anything are all examples of "works".

Related Research Articles

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

An anti-copyright notice is a specific statement that is added to a work in order to encourage wide distribution. Such notices are legally required to host such specific media; under the Berne Convention in international copyright law, works are protected even if no copyright statement is attached to them. However, "anti-copyright" statements typically do not take the form of either sophisticated public copyright licenses or a simple dedication to the public domain; instead, they usually just encourage wide distribution. Depending on jurisdiction, it is possible to denounce all claims to copyright in a work including moral rights in a written disclaimer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Share-alike</span> Condition in some free copyright licenses

Share-alike (🄎) is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licenses that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original. Copyleft licenses are free content or free software licenses with a share-alike condition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free-culture movement</span> Social movement promoting the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others

The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public-domain software</span> Software in the public domain

Public-domain software is software that has been placed in the public domain, in other words, software for which there is absolutely no ownership such as copyright, trademark, or patent. Software in the public domain can be modified, distributed, or sold even without any attribution by anyone; this is unlike the common case of software under exclusive copyright, where licenses grant limited usage rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WTFPL</span> Permissive free software license

The WTFPL is a permissive free software license. As a public domain like license, the WTFPL is essentially the same as dedication to the public domain. It allows redistribution and modification of the work under any terms. The name is an abbreviation of Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public-domain-equivalent license</span> License that waives all copyright

Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Source Judaism</span>

Open-source Judaism is a name given to initiatives within the Jewish community employing open content and open-source licensing strategies for collaboratively creating and sharing works about or inspired by Judaism for faster, instantaneous communication. Open-source efforts in Judaism utilize licensing strategies by which contemporary products of Jewish culture under copyright may be adopted, adapted, and redistributed with credit and attribution accorded to the creators of these works. Often collaborative, these efforts are comparable to those of other open-source religious initiatives inspired by the free culture movement to openly share and broadly disseminate seminal texts and techniques under the aegis of copyright law. Combined, these initiatives describe an open-source movement in Judaism that values correct attribution of sources, creative sharing in an intellectual commons, adaptable future-proof technologies, open technological standards, open access to primary and secondary sources and their translations, and personal autonomy in the study and craft of works of Torah.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free content</span> Creative work with few or no restrictions on how it may be used

Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work, meaning "works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose." Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public domain</span> Works outside the scope of copyright law

The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds the exclusive rights, anyone can legally use or reference those works without permission.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Free Documentation License</span> Copyleft license primarily for free software documentation

The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities, the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient.

Creative Commons is maintaining a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Definition of Free Cultural Works</span> Project to define free content

The Definition of Free Cultural Works evaluates and recommends compatible free content licenses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Government Licence</span> UK government copyright licence

The Open Government Licence is a copyright licence for Crown copyright works published by the UK government. Other UK public sector bodies may apply it to their publications. It was developed and is maintained by The National Archives. It is compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.

A free license or open license is a license which allows others to reuse another creator’s work as they wish. Without a special license, these uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or commercial license. Most free licenses are worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and perpetual. Free licenses are often the basis of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding projects.

A public license or public copyright licenses is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees. By applying a public license to a work, provided that the licensees obey the terms and conditions of the license, copyright holders give permission for others to copy or change their work in ways that would otherwise infringe copyright law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unsplash</span> Copyright-free stock photography website

Unsplash is a website dedicated to proprietary stock photography. Since 2021, it has been owned by Getty Images. The website claims over 330,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 13 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 5 million photos. Unsplash has been cited as one of the world's leading photography websites by Forbes, Design Hub, CNET, Medium and The Next Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unlicense</span> Anti-copyright license

The Unlicense is a public domain equivalent license for software which provides a public domain waiver with a fall-back public-domain-like license, similar to the CC Zero for cultural works. It includes language used in earlier software projects and has a focus on an anti-copyright message.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creative Commons NonCommercial license</span> Set of licenses allowing free noncommercial use

A Creative Commons NonCommercial license is a Creative Commons license which a copyright holder can apply to their media to give public permission for anyone to reuse that media only for noncommercial activities. Creative Commons is an organization which develops a variety of public copyright licenses, and the "noncommercial" licenses are a subset of these. Unlike the CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA licenses, the CC BY-NC license is considered non-free.

References

  1. ↑ Shergill, Sanjeet (May 6, 2017). "The teacher's guide to Creative Commons licenses". Open Education Europa. Archived from the original on June 26, 2018. Retrieved March 15, 2018.
  2. ↑ "What are Creative Commons licenses?". Wageningen University & Research. June 16, 2015. Archived from the original on March 15, 2018. Retrieved March 15, 2018.
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