Respecting Copyright

The Internet offers the opportunity to access, share and collaborate, but this opportunities are often restricted by copyright. In response to this tension between digital opportunities and copyright restrictions, Creative Commons licenses were created in 2002 to provide an easy way to grant certain permissions.

⇒ Indeed, the economic rights are the exclusive rights to manage the permissions to reuse one's work.

⇒ By choosing to license their work under a Creative Commons license, a creator can choose to give permission up front to share and reuse their work in certain ways, while retaining their copyright.

⇒ Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright. On the contrary, they operate within the framework of copyright laws and international copyright conventions. (Source: The Story of Creative Commons)

If you would like to license your work under a Creative Commons license, use their License Chooser to select the one that suits you best and to get the icon and HTML code for it.

On the same page, there is also the Help others attribute you! tool that, by filling in some fields, allows you to specify how others should acknowledge your work and cite it properly.

• A new License Chooser beta is now available online.

Here is a video licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 from a series on copyright created by CARL.

Each Creative Commons license has three layers: the legal code, the human-readable and the machine-readable versions of the license.

The legal code is the layer that contains the legal elements of the license; see for example CC BY 4.0. The common deeds (human-readable version of the license) contain the basic elements you need to know to use the license; see for example CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, etc. The machine-readable layer allows search engines, websites, and web services to identify content available online under the various Creative Commons licenses. (See the License Chooser to retrieve the machine-readable code for your chosen license). Source: License Design and Terminology (Creative Commons)

There are six types of Creative Commons licenses:

⇒ All licenses include Attribution BY (CC BY) = "credit must be given to the creator".

⇒ In addition, the licenses specify whether certain types of uses are allowed. Here are the possible options:

- NonCommercial NC (BY-NC) limits the use of the work to non-commercial uses and does not depend on the person or entity using the work, but on the use itself. That is, a company could make a non-commercial use of the work and still be in compliance with the license.

- NoDerivatives ND (BY-ND) prevents any modification to the work, which can still be reused as is.

⇒ Finally, ShareAlike SA (BY-SA) allows sharing the work only under the same conditions of use.

Source: Licence Types (Creative Commons).

In addition to the six licenses, Creative Commons has created the CC0 tool , which allows creators to dedicate their work to the public domain or to disclaim copyright, in jurisdictions where it is not possible to immediately release a work in the public domain.

Copyright laws and the terms for which copyright subsists vary in each country, so a work may be in the public domain in Canada and still be protected in a country where the protection is longer.