Now that you know how the licences work and how they are designed, you are ready to use CC licences and CC0 for your own work and reuse CC-licensed works created by others.

This chapter covers what you need to know as a CC licensor and as a reuser. When your own CC-licensed work incorporates CC-licensed work made by others, you are both!

This chapter has four sections:

4.1 Choosing and Applying a CC Licence
4.2 Things to Consider after CC-Licensing
4.3 Finding and Reusing CC-Licensed Work
4.4 Remixing CC-Licensed Work

There are also additional resources if you are interested in learning more about any of the topics covered in this chapter.

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Before you decide that you want to apply a Creative Commons licence or CC0 to your creative work, there are some important things to consider:

The licences and CC0 are irrevocable. Irrevocable means a legal agreement that cannot be cancelled. That means once you apply a CC licence to a work, the CC licence applies to the work until the copyright on the work expires. This aspect of CC licensing is highly desirable from the perspective of reusers because they have confidence knowing the creator can’t arbitrarily pull back the rights granted them under the CC licence.

Because the licences are irrevocable, it is very important to carefully consider the options before deciding to use a CC licence on a work.

You must own or control copyright in the work to apply a Creative Commons licence to it. You should control copyright in the work to which you apply the licence. For example, you don’t own or control any copyright in a work that is in the public domain, and you don’t own or control the copyright to an Enrique Iglesias song. Further, if you created the material in the scope of your employment, you may not be the holder of the rights and may need to get permission from your employer before applying a CC licence. Before licensing, be mindful about whether you have copyright to the work to which you’re applying a CC licence. Visit Chapter 2.1 to review Copyright basics.

Which Creative Commons licence should I use?

The six Creative Commons licences provide a range of options for creators who want to share their work with the public while still retaining copyright. The best way to decide which licence is appropriate for you is to think about why you want to share and how you hope others will use your work.

For example, here are a few questions to consider:

• Do you think people might make interesting new works out of your creation? Do you want to give people the ability to translate your writing into different languages, or otherwise customise it for their own needs? If so, then you should choose a licence that allows your work to be adapted.
• Is it important to you that your images are able to be incorporated into Wikipedia? If so, then you should choose CC BY, BY-SA, or CC0, because Wikipedia does not allow images licensed under any of the NonCommercial or NoDerivatives licences except in limited circumstances.
• Do you want to give away all of your rights in your work so that it can be used by anyone in the world for any purpose? Then you might want to think about using the public domain dedication tool, CC0.

Creative Commons has licence chooser tools to help you choose your licence and provides the correct wording for your licence with a link to the licence. Try the chooser tool.

How do I apply a CC licence to my work?

Once you’ve decided you want to use a CC licence and know which licence you want to use, applying it is simple. Technically, all you have to do is indicate which CC licence you are applying to your work. However, we strongly recommend including a link (or writing out the CC licence URL, if you are working offline) to the relevant CC licence deed. You can do this in the copyright notice for your work, on the footer of your website, or any other place that makes sense in light of the particular format and medium of your work. The important thing is to make it clear what the CC licence covers and locate the notice in a place that makes that clear to the public. See Marking your work with a CC licence for more information.

Indicating which CC licence you choose can be as simple as the notice from the footer of the JCU Open Education Resources library guide.

If you are on a platform like Medium or Flickr, you should use the built-in CC licence tools on the platform to mark your work with the CC licence you choose.

If you have a personal blog or a website, we recommend using the CC licence chooser to generate code that identifies your chosen licence. That code can be copied and inserted into your work online.

Take some time to play around with the CC licence chooser now. After you work through the steps that indicate your preferences, the chooser generates the appropriate licence based on your selections. Remember, the licence chooser is not a registration page, it simply provides you with standardised HTML code, icons and licence statements.

For examples of CC licences applied to different creations, from videos to off-line documents, view this CC Wiki on Marking Your Work with a CC licence. And explore our licensing examples page.

How to apply CC0

If you want to dedicate your work to the public domain, use the CC licence chooser to relinquish your right to attribution as the creator. Complete the required fields, agree to the terms, and then copy the statement to mark your work with CC0.

If you want to mark the work in a different way or need to use a different format like closing titles in a video, you can access downloadable versions of all of the CC icons.

Attribution

Receiving credit for your work

An important aspect of CC licences is attribution. CC suggests following the “TASL approach” for attribution practices (both for marking your work, and providing attribution to others):

• T = Title
• A = Author (tell reusers who to give credit to)
• S = Source (give reusers a link to the resource)
• L = Licence (link to the CC licence deed)

If you give that information when sharing your work, others can easily discover, reuse and give you credit for the work. For more examples of how to mark your own work in different contexts, spend some time looking through CC’s extensive marking page.

When giving credit to the works of others

If you are using the work of others in your own work, you also have to give credit to those works in your own work.

When providing attribution, the goal is to mark the work with full TASL information. When you don’t have some of the TASL information about a work, do the best you can and include as much detail as possible in the marking statement.

See JCU’s FAQ about the difference between citations and attributions.

Note, that starting with Version 4.0 the licences no longer require a reuser to include the title as part of the attribution statement. However, if the title is provided, then CC encourages you to include it when attributing the author.

For more examples of how to mark your own work in different contexts, spend some time looking through CC’s extensive marking page.

See below for an example of marking an image with TASL information. The following image is a good example of CC marking because TASL with all appropriate links is provided in the attribution statement.

Indicating if your work is based on someone else’s work 

If your work is a modification or adaptation of another work, indicate this and provide attribution to the creator of the original work. You should also include a link to the work you modified and indicate what licence applies to that work.

Example here:

Marking work created by others that you are incorporating into your own work

In every case, the goals are the same: you want to make it easy for others to know who created what parts of the work:

1. Identify the terms under which any given work, or part of a work, can be used.
2. Provide information about works you used to create your new work or incorporated into your work.

Applying a CC licence alone is not enough to ensure your work is freely available for easy reuse and remix.

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Creative Commons licences are standardised licences, which means the terms and conditions are the same for all works subject to the same type of CC licence. This is an essential feature of their design, enabling the public to remix CC licensed works. It also makes the licences easy to understand.

But people and institutions who use the licences have diverse needs and wants. Sometimes creators want slightly different terms rather than the standard terms CC licences offer.

We strongly discourage people from customising open copyright licences because this creates confusion, requires users to take the time to learn about how the custom licence differs, and eliminates the benefits of standardisation. If you change any of the terms and conditions of a CC licence, you cannot call it a Creative Commons licence or otherwise use the CC trademarks. This rule also applies if you try to add restrictions on what people can do with CC licensed work through your separate agreements, such as website terms of service. For example, your website’s terms of service can’t tell people they can’t copy a CC licensed work (if they are complying with the licence terms). You can, however, make your CC licensed work available on more permissive terms and still call it a CC licence. For example, you may waive your right to receive attribution.

Creative Commons has a detailed legal policy outlining these rules, but the best way to apply them is to ask yourself: is what you want to do going to make it easier or harder for people to use your CC licensed work? If the latter, then generally it’s a restriction and you can’t do it unless you remove the Creative Commons name from the work.

Note that all of the above applies to creators of CC licensed work.

Charging for a CC licensed work

The first part of this section dealt with the requirements connected to changing the legal terms of a CC licensed work, whether by actually changing the licence terms or using separate contracts to try to do so.

But what if you simply want to sell a CC licensed work?

If you are the creator, then selling your work is always okay. In fact, selling physical copies (e.g., a textbook) and providing digital copies for free is a very common method for making money while using CC licences. Cards Against Humanity is a card game available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence. Cards Against Humanity offers their card decks available for free download online but sells physical copies.

Charging for access to digital copies of a CC licensed work is more difficult. It is permissible, but once someone pays for a copy of your work, they can legally distribute it to others for free under the terms of the applicable CC licence.

If you are charging for access to someone else’s CC licensed work—whether a physical copy or digital version—you have to pay attention to the particular CC licence applied to the work. If the CC licence includes the NonCommercial (NC) restriction, then you cannot charge the public to access the work.

Making your work accessible

Formats: Simply applying a CC licence to a creative work does not necessarily make it easy for others to reuse and remix it. Think about what technical format you are using for your content (e.g., PDF? MP3?). Can people download your work? Can they easily edit or remix it if the licence allows? In addition to the final polished version, many creators distribute editable source files of their content to make it easier for those who want to use the work for their own purposes. For example, in addition to the physical book or ebook, you might want to distribute files of a CC licensed book that enable people to easily cut and paste the content into their own works.

DRM: Using a distribution platform that applies digital rights management (DRM) (such as copy protection technology) to your work is another way you can inadvertently make it very hard for reusers to make use of the permissions in the CC licence. If you have to upload your CC licensed works to a platform that uses DRM, consider also distributing the same content on sites that do not use DRM.

What if you change your mind about the CC licence? Inevitably, there are creators who apply a CC licence to a work and then later decide they want to offer it on different terms. Even though the original licence cannot be revoked, the creator is free to also offer the work under a different licence. Similarly, the creator is free to remove the copy of the work they placed online.

In those cases, anyone who finds the work under the original licence is legally permitted to use it under those terms until the copyright expires. As a practical matter, reusers may want to comply with the creator’s new wishes as a matter of respect.

What if someone does something with my CC licensed work I don’t like?

As long as users abide by licence terms and conditions, authors/licensors cannot control how their material is used. That said, all CC licences provide several mechanisms that allow licensors to choose not to be associated with their material, or to uses of their material with which they disagree.

• First, all CC licences prohibit using the attribution requirement to suggest that the licensor endorses or supports a particular use.
• Second, licensors may waive the attribution requirement, choosing not to be identified as the licensor, if they wish.
• Third, if the licensor does not like how the material has been modified or used, CC licences require that the licensee remove the attribution information upon request. (In 3.0 and earlier, this is only a requirement for adaptations and collections; in 4.0, this also applies to the unmodified work.)
• Finally, anyone modifying licensed material must indicate that the original has been modified. This ensures that changes made to the original material—whether or not the licensor approves of them—are not attributed back to the licensor.
• Further, it is important to remember:
  • The Commons is full of good people who want to do the right thing, so we don’t often see much “abuse” of openly licensed works. Using CC licences gives good, responsible people the freedom to use and build on your work.
  • Copyright and/or open copyright licences don’t keep “bad” people from doing “bad” things with your work if they don’t care about copyright.

Legal Cases: Open Education

In the nearly two decades since the licences were first published, the number of lawsuits turning on the interpretation of a CC licence has been extremely low, especially considering that more than 1.6 billion CC-licensed works are available on the Internet. CC licences have fared incredibly well in court and disputes are rare when compared to the number of lawsuits between parties to privately negotiated, custom licences.^[1]

In 2017-2018 there were three legal cases: Great Minds vs. FedEx Office, Great Minds vs. Office Depot, and Philpot v Media Research Center. The outcomes of the court decisions for these three cases favoured the enforceability of CC licences and their role enabling sharing of content with the public.

Great Minds vs. FedEx Office, Great Minds vs. Office Depot^[2] Two of the three cases were raised by Great Minds, a curriculum developer. In these two cases, Great Minds received public funding from New York State to develop OER for school districts, which the organisation licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Different school districts asked FedEx and/or Office Depot to print the OER materials for use in their classrooms.

Great Minds brought the court cases against commercial copy shops that were hired by school districts to reproduce NC-licensed open educational resources (OER).

In both cases, Great Minds argued that school districts are not allowed to outsource the reproduction of educational materials licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 to contractors (the contractors are FedEx and Office Depot in these cases) who make a profit on those reproductions. Their theory was the contractor has to rely on the CC licence to make copies of the CC-licensed material.

Because the content was subject to a non-commercial licence, Great Minds claimed FedEx and Office Depot violated the licence by making a profit on the reproduction of the materials. Importantly, Great Minds never alleged that the school districts’ use of the reproduced materials violated the non-commercial restriction of the licence.

The central question in both cases is whether a licensee (a school district that is properly using the work for non-commercial purposes) may outsource the reproduction of the works to another entity that makes a profit on those reproductions.

In both cases, the district courts found no copyright infringement or violation of the CC licence by the copy shop. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit affirmed the lower court, ruling that a commercial copyshop (FedEx) may reproduce educational materials at the request of a school district that is using them under a CC BY-NC-SA licence. The Central District of California ruled similarly to the 2nd Circuit in a mirror case involving Office Depot. On appeal by Great Minds, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in November 2019 on the matter involving Office Depot. CC participated as amicus (view the amicus brief). View the oral argument in the appeal, including argument by outside counsel representing Creative Commons. No final decision has been rendered by the court as of December 12, 2019.

Philpot v Media Research Center Inc.^[3] The third case, Philpot v Media Research Center, involved Larry Philpot, a professional photographer who shared two photographs on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons licence. Philpot filed suit against the Media Research Center (MRC) for publishing his photographs in articles without attribution.

Following discovery (the phase of litigation during which factual evidence is gathered), MRC filed a motion for summary judgement asking the court to find that it did not infringe Philpot’s copyrights because it used the photos for purposes of news and commentary and those uses constitute fair use under US copyright law.

In its decision granting the motion for summary judgement, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia found that MRC’s uses of the two photographs constituted fair use under US copyright law. The court concluded that because fair use applied, attribution under the CC licence was not required.

Fair dealing/use eliminates the need to rely on or comply with the CC licence. This is the core design of all CC licences—CC licences grant permission only when permission is required under copyright law.

For additional details on the court cases, see the additional resources section.

Combining and adapting CC-licensed works is where things can get a little tricky. This lesson will give you the tools you need.

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Copying a CC licensed work and sharing it is pretty simple. Just make sure to provide attribution and refrain from using it for commercial purposes if it is licensed with one of the NonCommercial licences.

But what if you are changing a CC licensed work or incorporating it into a new work? First, remember that if your use of someone else’s CC licensed work falls under an exception or limitation to copyright (like fair dealing), then you have no obligations under the CC licence. If that is not the case, you need to rely on the CC licence for permission to adapt the work. The threshold question then becomes, is what you are doing creating an adaptation?

Adaptation (or derivative work, as it is called in some parts of the world) is a term of art in copyright law.^[4] It means creating something new from a copyrighted work that is sufficiently original to itself be protected by copyright. This is not always easy to determine, though some bright lines do exist. Read this explanation on the CC site about what constitutes an adaptation. Some examples of adaptations include a film based on a novel or a translation of a book from one language into another.

Keep in mind that not all changes to a work result in the creation of an adaptation, such as spelling corrections. Also remember that to constitute an adaptation, the resulting work itself must be considered based on or derived from the original. This means that if you use a few lines from a poem to illustrate a poetry technique in an article you’re writing, your article is not an adaptation because your article is not derived from or based on the poem from which you took a few lines. However, if you rearranged the stanzas in the poem and added new lines, then almost always the resulting work would be considered an adaptation.

Here are some particular types of uses to consider (some of them should be familiar from earlier lessons!):

• taking excerpts of a larger work (read the relevant FAQ)
• using a work in a different format (read the relevant FAQ)
• modifying a work (ead the relevant FAQ)

If your reuse of a CC licensed work does not create an adaptation, then:

• you are not required to apply a ShareAlike-licence to your overall work if you are using an SA-licensed work within it,
• the ND restriction does not prevent you from using an ND-licensed work,
• you can combine that CC-licensed material with other work as long as you attribute and comply with the NonCommercial restriction if it applies.

If your reuse of a CC licensed work does create an adaptation, then there are limits on whether and how you may share the adapted work. We will look at those next. But first, a note about collections of materials.

Adaptations/Remixes vs. Collections

Introductory note: The distinction between adaptations and collections is one of the trickiest concepts in copyright law. While there are many situations in which the differences are clear, there are also several ambiguous scenarios. The distinction between adaptations and remixes varies by jurisdiction and, even within a given jurisdiction, a judge’s determination between the two can be subjective, since there are few definitive rules on which to rely.

In contrast to an adaptation or remix, a collection involves the assembly of separate and independent creative works into a collective whole. A collection is not an adaptation. One community member likened the difference between adaptations and collections to smoothies and TV dinners, respectively.

1. Like a smoothie, an adaptation/remix mixes material from different sources to create a wholly new creation:

In a “smoothie” or adaptation/remix, you often cannot tell where one open work ends and another one begins. While this flexibility is useful for the new creator, it is still important to provide attribution to the individual parts that went into making the adaptation.

An example of an education adaptation would be an open textbook chapter that weaves together multiple open educational resources in such a way that the reader can’t tell which resource was used on which page. That said, the endnotes of the book chapter should still provide attribution to all of the sources that were remixed in the chapter.

2. Like a TV dinner, a collection compiles different works together while keeping them organised as distinct separate objects. An example of a collection would be a book that compiles openly-licensed essays from different sources.

When you create a collection, you must provide attribution and licensing information about the individual works in your collection. This gives the public the information they need to understand who created what and which licence terms apply to specific content. Revisit Section 4.1 on choosing a licence to learn how to properly indicate the copyright status of third party works that you incorporate into your new work.

When you combine material into a collection, you may have a separate copyright of your own that you may licence. However, your copyright only extends to the new contributions you made to the work. In a collection, that is the selection and arrangement of the various works in the collection, and not the individual works themselves. For example, you can select and arrange pre-existing poems published by others into an anthology, write an introduction, and design a cover for the collection, but your copyright and the only copyright you can license extends to your arrangement of the poems (not the poems themselves), and your original introduction and cover. The poems are not yours to licence.

What happens when you create an adaptation of a CC licensed work or works?

General rules:

• If the underlying work is licensed under a NoDerivatives licence, you can make and use changes privately but you cannot share your adaptation with others, as discussed above.
• If the underlying work is licensed under a ShareAlike licence, then ShareAlike applies to your adaptation and you must license it under the same or a compatible licence. More on this below.
• You need to consider licence compatibility. Licence compatibility is the term used to address the issue of which types of licensed works can be adapted into a new work.
• In all cases, you have to attribute the original work when you create an adaptation.

Scenarios:

When creating an adaptation of a CC licensed work, the simplest scenario is when you take a single CC licensed work and adapt it.

The more complicated scenario is when you are adapting two or more CC licensed works into a new work.

In both situations, you need to consider what options you have for licensing the copyright you have in your adaptation; this is called the Adapter’s Licence. Remember that your rights in your adaptation only apply to your own contributions. The original licence continues to govern reuse of the elements from the original work that you used when creating your adaptation. This Adapters Licence Chart chart may be a helpful guide. When creating an adaptation of material under the licence identified in the left hand column, you may licence your contributions to the adaptation under one of the licences indicated on the top row if the corresponding box is green. CC does not recommend using a licence if the corresponding box is yellow, although doing so is technically permitted by the terms of the licence. 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 licences from all rights holders. Dark gray boxes indicate those licences that you may not use as your adapter’s licence.

How to pick your Adapter’s Licence:

• If the underlying work is licensed with BY or BY-NC, we recommend your adapter’s licence include at least the same licence elements as the licence applied to the original. For example, if one adapts a BY-NC work, they will apply BY-NC to their adaptation. If one adapts a BY work, they could apply either BY or BY-NC to their adaptation.
• If the underlying work is licensed with BY-SA or BY-NC-SA, your adapter’s licence must be the same licence applied to the original or a licence that is designated as compatible with the original licence. We’ll discuss licence compatibility in more detail below.
• Remember, if the underlying work is licensed with BY-ND or BY-NC-ND, you cannot distribute adaptations so you don’t need to be concerned about what adapter’s licence to apply.

Understanding licence compatibility

When people talk about licences being “compatible,” they can be referring to several different situations.

One type of licence compatibility involves the question of what licences you can use for your adapter’s licence when you adapt a work. This is what we discussed above. For example, BY-NC is compatible with BY, in the sense that one can adapt a BY work and use BY-NC on their adaptation.

By definition, the ShareAlike licences have very few compatible licences. All SA licences after version 1.0 allow you to use a later version of the same licence on your adaptation. For example, if you remix a BY-SA 2.0 work, you can, and should, apply BY-SA 4.0 to your adaptation. There are also a small number of non-CC licences that have been designated as CC Compatible Licences for ShareAlike purposes.

Another type of licence compatibility relates to what licences are compatible when adapting (more commonly referred to as “remixing” in this context) more than one pre-existing work. The remix chart below may be a helpful guide in these circumstances. To use the chart, find a licence that applies to one of the works on the left column and the licence that applies to the other work on the top right row. If there is a checkmark in the box where that row and column intersect, then the works under those two licences can be remixed. If there is an “X” in the box, then the works may not be remixed unless an exception or limitation applies.

When using the chart, you can determine which licence to use for your adaptation by choosing the more restrictive of the two licences on the works you are combining. While that technically isn’t your only option for your adapter’s licence, it is best practice because it eases reuse for downstream users.