Creative Commons license

This article is about the Creative Commons licenses. For the organization that produced them, see Creative Commons.

Creative Commons logo
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".[a] 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]

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.[7][8]

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.[9][10][11]


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  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.
  3. ^ "Creative Commons licenses". University of Michigan Library. Archived from the original on November 21, 2018. Retrieved March 15, 2018.
  4. ^ "Creative Commons licenses" (PDF). University of Glasgow. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 15, 2018. Retrieved March 15, 2018.
  5. ^ "The Creative Commons licenses". UNESCO. Archived from the original on March 15, 2018. Retrieved March 15, 2018.
  6. ^ "License Versions". Creative Commons Wiki. Archived from the original on June 30, 2017. Retrieved July 4, 2017.
  7. ^ "Creative Commons | University of Minnesota Libraries". www.lib.umn.edu. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  8. ^ "What Is a Creative Commons License?". Copyright Alliance. September 7, 2016. Archived from the original on September 30, 2024. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  9. ^ "Open Definition 2.1". Open Definition. Archived from the original on January 27, 2017. Retrieved January 25, 2023.
  10. ^ "Conformant Licenses". Open Definition. Archived from the original on March 1, 2016. Retrieved January 25, 2023.
  11. ^ Vollmer, Timothy (December 27, 2013). "Creative Commons 4.0 BY and BY-SA licenses approved conformant with the Open Definition". Creative Commons. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved January 25, 2023.