There are six types of Creative Commons licenses. They offer tools for creators to indicate which usage rights of their works are granted to the public. The classification is based on a combination of four conditions, namely: Attribution, ShareAlike, NoDerivs, and NonCommerical. The icons and descriptions of the four conditions are shown below:
This is an adoption of the guide Six Licenses for Sharing Your Work by Creative Commons under CC0.
License | Copy & Redistribute | Attribution | Commercial Use | Modify & Remix | Change License | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Attribution (CC BY) |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | |
Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND) |
Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) |
Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | |
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) |
Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | |
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) |
Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | |
CC0 | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
Public Domain Mark | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Creative Commons also provides options for placing a work in the public domain. Creators can choose CC0 if they want to waive all usage rights, in other words “all right granted”. Henceforth others can use the creator's work under CC0 for any purpose and without any restriction under the copyright law. If a work is already in the public domain, the Public Domain Mark can be assigned to the work to make it easily discoverable and available to the public.
Need some help to choose the appropriate license for your work?
The Creative Commons License Chooser can guide you to choose which Creative Commons license is the most suitable for your work. The Chooser will also provide a machine-readable code for your work on a web page.
Click HERE to start.
You can find examples of attribution here.