# Creative Commons (CC) Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred. It provides a set of standardized copyright licenses that allow creators to grant specific usage permissions to the public while retaining some rights — a middle ground between full copyright ("all rights reserved") and public domain ("no rights reserved"). CC licenses are composable from four elements: Attribution (BY), ShareAlike (SA), NonCommercial (NC), and NoDerivatives (ND). These combine into six standard licenses plus the CC0 public domain dedication. ## License Types | License | Allows | Requires | |---------|--------|----------| | **CC BY** | Any use including commercial | Attribution | | **CC BY-SA** | Any use including commercial | Attribution + same license on derivatives | | **CC BY-NC** | Non-commercial use | Attribution | | **CC BY-NC-SA** | Non-commercial use | Attribution + same license on derivatives | | **CC BY-ND** | Sharing only (no derivatives) | Attribution | | **CC BY-NC-ND** | Non-commercial sharing only | Attribution | | **CC0** | Anything (public domain) | Nothing | ## Openness Spectrum | Most Open | | | Most Restrictive | |-----------|--|--|------------------| | CC0 | CC BY | CC BY-SA | CC BY-NC-ND | CC BY-SA is the "copyleft" license — similar in spirit to the GPL in [[Open Source]] software. [[Wikipedia]] uses CC BY-SA for all its content. ## Impact Creative Commons licenses are used on over 2 billion works worldwide. They underpin major knowledge-sharing platforms ([[Wikipedia]], Khan Academy, Flickr, MIT OpenCourseWare) and have become the default licensing framework for open educational resources, open access research, and open data. ## References - https://creativecommons.org - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons ## Related - [[Open Source]] - [[Wikipedia]] - [[Collective Intelligence]]