Creative Commons

If you create a work, be it music, an image or a text, for example, you automatically receive the copyright for it. This ensures that nobody can use this work without asking the author for permission. Sometimes, however, the author would like people to interact with their work and create new things with it without having to ask their permission every time. This is also possible, but most people are not in a position to formulate the necessary legal texts. That's why the Creative Commons Corporation has developed several licenses that anyone can use to make their work more easily available to others. Those who want to use copyrighted works can more easily recognize which uses are permitted under which conditions without consulting the author. Other uses can of course also be permitted, but then the author must be asked for permission. All licenses exist in three versions:
 

1. the complete legal text

2. a human-readable version

3. a machine-readable version

The Creative Commons licenses are based on four symbols:

The BY is present in all licenses (except the CC 0 license). It states that the work may only be used with attribution. This means that you must state the name of the author, the title, a link to the original work and the type of license.

The NC stands for non-commercial. This means that commercial use is excluded. Unfortunately, it is not always entirely clear what commercial use means. A public institution is seen as commercial in this sense. Anyone who generates advertising revenue with their website can also be considered commercial, so that resources marked as such on these pages should not be used without consultation. This license is generally not suitable for scientific articles, as research is also funded by the public sector to provide knowledge for SMEs, for example. The transfer of scientific research to the economy is an important goal!

The SA stands for share-alike. This means that works based on it must also be passed on under the same SA license. The advantage of this is that a lot of freely available content can be generated quickly. The disadvantage, however, is that only materials with the same license can be combined. For science in particular, this is usually too restrictive and is therefore not recommended.

The ND stands for non-derivative. This means that the work may only be passed on in its entirety and without changes. This means that no individual tables or graphics from an article may be used, e.g. for a course. The work may not be translated or parts of it recompiled in a database. This license is therefore useless for academic practice.

All six available licenses are made up of these four components:

Further information can be found on the Creative Commons website https://creativecommons.org/

For example, here is a search engine for images with CC licenses: https://search.creativecommons.org/

There is also a tool here that can be used to determine the appropriate CC license for you. The tool also provides the required code, which you can then copy-paste into your own website: https://creativecommons.org/choose/

Using texts, images and music - what am I allowed to do with CC licenses? by Silke Frank is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.