Can i use creative commons

Many of the licenses also allow an artist to keep her options open if she isn't sure what she'll want to do with her work in the future. Bloggers and other online presences are also increasingly turning to Creative Commons in the spirit of share and share alike into a voluntary public domain.

More info: Creative Commons. Contents 4 min read. Freelance writer and editor Michelle Kaminsky, Esq. She earned a Juris Docto… Read more. Here's how to avoid accidentally stepping on the rights of another's creative work. Learn how to use the copyright symbol on your works, such as websites, books, and photographs. In order to qualify for copyright protection, an original creative work must exist in tangible form—in other words, written down or in a form you can touch. Social media is becoming a vital part of marketing strategies in businesses bothlarge and small.

Connecting with customers is the new expectation. But how this trend affects both the creators of original content and those who choose to repost or retweet something that wasn't their creation—remains to be seen. Find out what constitutes a derivative work and how it's protected by copyright law. Plagiarism is a confusing subject, and can often occur without the artist knowing it until it is too late. How do you know when it has occurred and how do you prove it?

Read more to find out. There are a lot of complicated parts to copyright law; determining how long a copyright lasts is not one of them.

It doesn't matter if you create computer code, abstract sculpture or technical writing: the terms of copyrights are all the same.

Each work is automatically protected by copyright, which means that others will need to ask permission from you as the copyright owner. The letter pairs indicate conditions for use. CC BY is the most open license. If you are unsure, you should either contact the rights holder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses. CC has a brief guide to interpretation of the NC license that goes into more detail about the meaning of the NC license and some key points to pay attention to.

Additionally, in , Creative Commons published results from a survey on meanings of commercial and noncommercial use generally. When any of the six CC licenses is applied to material, licensees are granted permission to use the material as the license allows, whatever the media or format chosen by the user when it is used or distributed further. This is true even in our NoDerivatives licenses.

This means, for example, that even if a creator distributes a work in digital format, you have permission to print and share a hard copy of the same work.

As with most copyright questions, it will depend on applicable law. Generally, to be different works under copyright law, there must be expressive or original choices made that make one work a separate and distinct work from another.

The determination depends on the standards for copyright in the relevant jurisdiction. Under U. Consequently, digitally enhancing or changing the format of a work absent some originality , such as expressive choices made in the enhancement or encoding, will not likely create a separate work for copyright purposes. The creative bar is low, but it is not non-existent.

Accordingly, in some jurisdictions releasing a photograph under a CC license will give the public permission to reuse the photograph in a different resolution. What constitutes an adaptation , otherwise known as a derivative work, varies slightly based on the law of the relevant jurisdiction.

Incorporating an unaltered excerpt from an ND-licensed work into a larger work only creates an adaptation if the larger work can be said to be built upon and derived from the work from which the excerpt was taken.

Generally, no derivative work is made of the original from which the excerpt was taken when the excerpt is used to illuminate an idea or provide an example in another larger work. Instead, only the reproduction right of the original copyright holder is being exercised by person reusing the excerpt. All CC licenses grant the right to reproduce a CC-licensed work for noncommercial purposes at a minimum.

For example, a person could make copies of one chapter of an ND-licensed book and not be in violation of the license so long as other conditions of the license are met. There are exceptions to that general rule, however, when the excerpts are combined with other material in a way that creates some new version of the original from which the excerpt is taken.

For example, if a portion of a song was used as part of a new song, that may rise to the level of creating an adaptation of the original song, even though only a portion of it was used and even if that portion was used as-is. When you receive material under a Creative Commons license, you may not place additional terms and conditions on the reuse of the work.

A technological measure is considered an ETM if circumventing it carries penalties under laws fulfilling obligations under Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty adopted on December 20, , or similar international agreements. Generally, this means that the anti-circumvention laws of various jurisdictions would cover attempts to break it. For example, if you remix a CC-licensed song, and you wish to share it on a music site that places digital copy-restriction on all uploaded files, you may not do this without express permission from the licensor.

However, if you upload that same file to your own site or any other site that does not apply DRM to the file, and a listener chooses to stream it through an app that applies DRM, you have not violated the license. Note that merely converting material into a different format that is difficult to access or is only available for certain platforms does not violate the restriction; you may do this without violating the license terms. This is not considered to be a prohibited measure, so long as the protection is merely limiting who may access the content, and does not restrict the authorized recipients from exercising the licensed rights.

For example, you may post material under any CC license on a site restricted to members of a certain school, or to paying customers, but you may not place effective technological measures including DRM on the files that prevents them from sharing the material elsewhere. Note that charging for access may not be permitted with NC-licensed material; however, it is not disallowed by the restriction on ETMs.

All CC licenses allow redistribution of the unmodified material by any means, including distribution via file-sharing networks. Note that file-trading is expressly considered to be noncommercial for purposes of compliance with the NC licenses.

Barter of NC-licensed material for other items of value is not permitted. It is always a good idea to familiarize yourself with the terms and conditions that apply to any service you are using. Generally speaking, most social media platforms allow users to keep the copyright they have in their content and ask users to grant them a copyright license to use that content for purposes of providing their service.

In some cases, platforms may also ask for a license to use your content in advertising and other promotions of their service. Creative Commons licenses do not allow sublicensing, which means you cannot grant a license to a platform with respect to the rights in any CC-licensed content you do not own. For example, if you share on Facebook a CC-licensed image you downloaded from Flickr, you cannot grant Facebook any rights to that image under copyright.

However, it is unusual for social media platforms to require you to own or control the copyright on all content you share on their sites. Instead, they often simply require that you have the rights to post it. When sharing CC-licensed content, always remember to provide proper attribution and otherwise comply with the relevant license conditions.

If you have received material under a CC license that is encumbered with effective technological measures such as digital rights management or DRM , you may or may not be permitted to break it, depending on the circumstances.

By releasing material under a CC license, the licensor agrees not to assert any rights she may have to prevent the circumvention of effective technological measures. However, if she has uploaded it to a site or other distribution channel that itself applies such measures, that site may have the right to prevent you from breaking them, even though the licensor herself cannot do so.

It is possible that CC-licensed material will appear on platforms that impose terms in addition to the copyright license though Creative Commons strongly discourages restrictions that interfere with exercise of the licensed rights. These additional terms do not form part of the license for the work. For example, if you download CC-licensed material from a site that does not permit downloading, you may be breaking the terms of use of the site, but you are not infringing the CC license.

See our guide to Modifying the CC licenses for more guidance and information. Whether a modification of licensed material is considered an adaptation for the purpose of CC licenses depends primarily on the applicable copyright law. Copyright law reserves to an original creator the right to create adaptations of the original work.

CC licenses that allow for adaptations to be shared—all except BY-ND and BY-NC-ND—grant permission to others to create and redistribute adaptations when doing so would otherwise constitute a violation of applicable copyright law. Generally, a modification rises to the level of an adaptation under copyright law when the modified work is based on the prior work but manifests sufficient new creativity to be copyrightable, such as a translation of a novel from one language to another, or the creation of a screenplay based on a novel.

Under CC licenses, synching music in timed relation with a moving image is always considered an adaptation, whether or not it would be considered so under applicable law. Also, under version 4. For more details about adaptations in the database context, see the Data FAQ. Note that all CC licenses allow the user to exercise the rights permitted under the license in any format or medium.

Those changes are not considered adaptations even if applicable law would suggest otherwise. For example, you may redistribute a book that uses the CC BY-NC-ND license in print form when it was originally distributed online, even if you have had to make formatting changes to do so, as long as you do so in compliance with the other terms of the license.

The first question to ask is whether doing so constitutes an adaptation. If the combination does not create an adaptation, then you may combine any CC-licensed content so long as you provide attribution and comply with the NonCommercial restriction if it applies.

If you want to combine material in a way that results in the creation of an adaptation i. The NoDerivatives licenses do not permit remixing except for private use the pre All the other CC licenses allow remixes, but may impose limitations or conditions on how the remix may be used.

For example, if you create a remix with material licensed under a ShareAlike license, you need to make sure that all of the material contributed to the remix is licensed under the same license or one that CC has named as compatible , and you must properly credit all of the sources with the required attribution and license information. Similarly, if you want to use a remix for commercial purposes , you cannot incorporate material released under one of the NonCommercial licenses.

The chart below shows which CC-licensed material can be remixed. To use the chart, find a license on the left column and on the top right row. If there is a check mark in the box where that row and column intersect, then the works can be remixed. See below for details on how remixes may be licensed. If you make adaptations of material under a CC license i. See the chart below for more details. All licenses after version 1.

See the license versions page for details. Since you may not share remixes of these materials at all, there is no compatibility with other licenses. Note that the ND licenses do allow you to reproduce the material in unmodified form together with other material in a collection, as indicated in the next FAQ.

When creating an adaptation of material under the license identified in the lefthand column, you may license your contributions to the adaptation under one of the licenses indicated on the top row if the corresponding box is green.

CC does not recommend using a license if the corresponding box is yellow, although doing so is technically permitted by the terms of the license. If you do, you should take additional care to mark the adaptation as involving multiple copyrights under different terms so that downstream users are aware of their obligations to comply with the licenses from all rights holders. All Creative Commons licenses including the version 4. You may choose a license for the collection, however this does not change the license applicable to the original material.

When you include CC-licensed content in a collection, you still must adhere to the license conditions governing your use of the material incorporated. For example, material under any of the Creative Commons NonCommercial licenses cannot be used commercially.

The table below indicates what type of CC-licensed works you may incorporate into collections licensed for commercial and noncommercial uses. Note that the relevant rights may expire at different times. For example, you may have a CC-licensed song where the rights in the musical arrangement expire before the rights in the lyrics. In this case, when the copyright in the music expires, you may use it without being required to comply with the conditions of the CC license ; however, you must still comply with the license if you use the lyrics.

The CC licenses are irrevocable. This means that once you receive material under a CC license, you will always have the right to use it under those license terms, even if the licensor changes his or her mind and stops distributing under the CC license terms.

All of the CC licenses terminate if you fail to follow the license conditions. If this happens, you no longer have a license to use the material. If you have lost your rights under a CC license and are not entitled to automatic reinstatement, you may regain your rights under the license if the licensor expressly grants you permission.

You cannot simply re-download the material to get a new license. Note that you may still be liable for damages for copyright infringement for the period where you were not in compliance with the license. The Creative Commons licenses have three layers , as does the CC0 public domain dedication : the human-readable deed, the lawyer-readable legal code, and the machine-readable metadata. The Public Domain Mark is not legally operative, and so has only two layers: the human-readable mark and machine-readable metadata.

When material is licensed using any of the CC licenses or tools, it is highly recommended that a CC button , text, or other marker somehow accompany it. There are many possible modes for marking. For our licenses, people generally use the CC license chooser to generate HTML code that can be pasted into the webpage where the licensed material is published.

CC0 and the Public Domain Mark have a separate chooser. Many platforms and web services such as Flickr and Drupal support CC licensing directly, allowing you to select an appropriate license. The service then properly marks the work for you. CC has published some best practices for marking your CC-licensed material, and recommends:. See the marking page for more details. Before Creative Commons developed this vocabulary, it was difficult for a machine to ascertain whether an object was marked with a CC license.

There was also no standard, predictable place to house metadata about that license for example, the source URL of the work or the required mode of attribution. Machine-readable metadata based on well-accepted metadata standards creates a platform upon which new services and applications can be built.

Software and services can detect CC licenses and the details of that license, as described by the metadata. For example, on many websites and search engines such as Google and Flickr, you can run filtered searches for works offered under specific CC licenses. In addition, CC license deeds can automatically create copy-and-paste attribution code so users may easily comply with the BY condition of the licenses. When you click on a CC license or button from a page with license metadata, you get copy-and-paste attribution HTML within that license deed page.

RDFa is a method for embedding structured data in a web page. For more information about RDFa, see the following resources:. Some search engines like Google allow people to filter their search results by usage rights so that you can limit your search results according to the particular CC license you seek.

For example, if you are looking for a photo to adapt, you can filter your search to return photos that have a CC license that permits creation of adaptations. You can generally find this search feature on the advanced search page of your selected search engine. You can also use CC Search , which offers a convenient interface to search and a list of those content providers that support searches for content based on usage rights. Please note, however, that you should always double check to make sure that the work you locate through a search is licensed as you wish.

Creative Commons provides tools for integrating license selection with your site. You can find an overview at the Web Integration article on the CC wiki. The Partner Interface is a good way to get started and will always have the most up-to-date license versions and translations.

However, there is also an API available if you want more control. Mozilla has included the Creative Commons search function in many versions of Firefox along with search options for Google, Amazon, and other popular sites.

Please take a look at the Firefox article on the CC wiki for an explanation of how to change these features. If you want to add or remove a particular search option, click on the logo in the search box for example, the CC logo or the Google logo.

This will open the pull down menu, which will allow you to select different search providers. You can also alter the order in which the search providers appear on the pull down menu. CC licenses are a form of rights expression, not rights management. CC provides tools to make it easier for creators and owners to say which rights they reserve and permissions they grant. Copyright law grants exclusive rights to creators of original works of authorship.

On the internet, even the most basic activities involve making copies of copyrighted content. As content is increasingly uploaded, downloaded, and shared online, copyright law is becoming more relevant to more people than it was 20 years ago. Unfortunately, infringing copyrights—even unintentionally or unknowingly—can lead to liability. Successful navigation of the internet requires some understanding of copyright law.

The public domain of copyright refers to the aggregate of those works that are not restricted by copyright within a given jurisdiction. A work may be part of the public domain because the applicable term of copyright has expired, because the rights holder surrendered copyright in the work with a tool like CC0 , or because the work did not meet the applicable standards for copyrightability.

Copyright in most jurisdictions attaches automatically without need for any formality once a creative work is fixed in tangible form i. In some jurisdictions, creators may be required to register with a national agency in order to enforce copyright in court. Although you do not have to apply a copyright notice for your work to be protected, it may be a useful tool to clearly signal to people that the work is yours. It also tells the public who to contact about the work. An adaptation is a work based on one or more pre-existing works.

What constitutes an adaptation depends on applicable law, however translating a work from one language to another or creating a film version of a novel are generally considered adaptations. In order for an adaptation to be protected by copyright, most national laws require the creator of the adaptation to add original expression to the pre-existing work.

However, there is no international standard for originality, and the definition differs depending on the jurisdiction. Common law jurisdictions such as the U. Moral rights protect the personal and reputational value of a work for its creator. CC offers some additional information on how CC licenses may affect your moral rights. Copyright provides an incentive to create works by providing exclusive rights to creators.

However, the distribution or exploitation of a work often involves more than just the creator. For example, if someone writes a song, someone else may perform the song, and another may produce the recording of the song. Some jurisdictions extend copyright to the contributions made by these persons; other jurisdictions extend such exclusive rights in the form of neighboring rights.

The Rome Convention sets forth some guidelines on the scope of neighboring rights. Not all jurisdictions recognize neighboring rights. Sui generis database rights grant qualifying database makers the right to prohibit the extraction and reuse of a substantial portion of a database.

The rights are granted to database makers that make a substantial investment of time and resources to create the database. Sui generis database rights are primarily enacted within the European Union and a handful of other jurisdictions.

Collecting societies are copyright management organizations. These societies license works on behalf of their owners and process royalty payments from parties using the copyrighted works. CC offers additional information on how collecting societies might affect your rights and your ability to apply CC licenses to your work. CC has several pilots underway with collecting societies that have chosen to allow their members to use CC licenses on a limited basis.

These terms are used differently in different jurisdictions. Generally speaking, these rights allow individuals to control the use of their voice, image, likeness, or other identifiable aspect of their identity, especially for purposes of commercial exploitation.

Whether and to what extent these rights exist, and if so, how they are labeled, varies depending on the jurisdiction. Creative Commons licenses have a limited effect on these rights where the licensor holds them.

Where the licensor has publicity, personality, or privacy rights that may affect your ability to use the material as the license intends, the licensor agrees to waive or not assert those rights. However, any such rights not held by the licensor are not affected and may still affect your desired use of a licensed work. If you have created a work or wish to use a work that might in some way implicate these rights, you may need to obtain permission from the individuals whose rights may be affected.

This page supersedes Databases and Creative Commons. Much of the potential value of data is to society at large — more data has the potential to facilitate enhanced scientific collaboration and reproducibility, more efficient markets, increased government and corporate transparency, and overall to speed discovery and understanding of solutions to planetary and societal needs. A big part of the potential value of data, in particular its society-wide value, is realized by use across organizational boundaries.

How does this occur legally? Many sites give narrow permission to use data via terms of service. Much ad hoc data sharing also occurs among researchers. And increasingly, sharing of data is facilitated by distribution under standard, public legal tools used to manage copyright and similar restrictions that might otherwise limit dissemination or reuse of data, e.

CC licenses or the CC0 public domain dedication. Many organizations, institutions, and governments are using CC tools for data. For case studies about how these tools are applied, see:. Yes, CC licenses can be used to license databases. The most recent version 4. Sui generis database rights prevent copying and reusing of substantial parts of a database including frequent extraction of insubstantial parts.

In addition to our licenses, the CC0 Public Domain Dedication may be used on databases to maximize reuse of databases. When applied, the effect is to waive all copyright and related rights in the database and its contents, placing it as close as possible into the worldwide public domain.

In certain domains, such as science and government, there are important reasons to consider using CC0. Waiving copyright and related rights eliminates all uncertainty for potential users, encouraging maximal reuse and sharing of information. The license terms and conditions apply to the database structure its selection and arrangement, to the extent copyrightable , its contents if copyrightable , and in those instances where the database maker has sui generis database rights then the rights that are granted those makers.

Notwithstanding, licensors can choose to license some rather than all of the rights they have in a database. Creative Commons advises against this practice. However, if a licensor chooses to do so anyway, we strongly encourage licensors to clearly demarcate what is and is not licensed.

See below for more information regarding how to provide clear notice of what is licensed. Before making a database available under a CC license, a database provider should first make sure she has all rights necessary to do so. Often, the database provider is not the original author of the database contents. If that is the case, the database provider should secure separate permission from the other author s before publishing the database under a CC legal tool.

If a database maker decides to license the database without securing permission from the author s of the database contents, it should clearly indicate the material for which permission has not been secured and clearly mark the material as not being offered under the terms of the license. For more information, read our pre-licensing guidelines. Database providers should also consider carefully what elements of the database she wants covered by the CC legal tool and identify those elements in a manner that reusers will see and understand.

Under version 4. The other license elements BY, ND, and SA, as applicable must be complied with only if your use is so restricted and public sharing is involved. Prior CC license versions do not require compliance with the license restrictions or conditions when only sui generis database rights and not copyright are implicated.

Please see below for more detail about how this works in the current and prior versions of the licenses. However, you should be aware that whether you have to comply with the CC license terms and conditions will depend on whether the type of mining activity you conduct implicates copyright or any applicable sui generis database rights.

If you are not exercising an exclusive right held by the database maker, then you do not need to rely on the license to mine. Because there are many different methods for conducting text and data mining, however, there may be some types of mining activities that will implicate the licensed rights. If and only if your particular use is one that would require permission , you should note the following:. You must own or control copyright in the work.

Only the copyright holder or someone with express permission from the copyright holder can apply a CC license or CC0 to a copyrighted work. If you created a work in the scope of your job, you may not be the holder of the copyright. See this page for more pre-licensing considerations. CC-licensing your work is simple. All you have to do is choose the CC license that suits your needs and then communicate this choice in a way that will be clear to people who come across your work.

This can be as simple as a bit of text stating and linking to the license in a copyright notice, like this:. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.