Although Creative Commons is best known for its licenses, our work goes beyond providing copyright licenses. CC provides other legal and technical tools that also facilitate the sharing and discovery of creative works, such as CC0, a public domain dedication for rights holders who wish to put their work in the public domain before copyright expires, and the public domain trademark, a tool to identify a work that has fallen into the public domain worldwide. Creative Commons licenses and tools are specifically designed to work with the web, making content offered on their terms easy to search, discover, and use. Creative Commons licenses provide an easy way to manage copyright provisions that are automatically attached to all copyrighted creative materials. Our licenses allow this material to be shared and reused under flexible and legally sound conditions. Creative Commons offers a basic suite of six copyright licenses. Since there is no single “Creative Commons license”, it is important to identify which of the six licenses you apply to your material, which of the six licenses has been applied to the material you want to use, and, in both cases, the specific version. A Creative Commons licensor answers a few simple questions along the way to licensing – first, do I want to allow commercial use or not, and second, do I want to allow derivative works or not? If a licensor decides to authorise derivative works, it can also require that anyone who uses the work – we call it a licensee – make that new work available under the same licence conditions. We call this idea “ShareLike” and it`s one of the mechanisms that (if elected) help the digital commons develop over time. ShareAlike is inspired by the GNU General Public License, which is used by many free and open source software projects.
One of the main reasons for versioning licenses from 3.0 to 4.0 was to eliminate porting, an unnecessarily complex process that could be eliminated if CC took care to internationalize new licenses. Starting with version 4.0, the latest version of the CC license suite, CC no longer “ported” licenses. Licenses ported to previous versions may continue to be used and remain valid and enforceable; However, Creative Commons discourages its use and recommends version 4.0 as the latest and most up-to-date mindset of CC and its global network. For example, under U.S. copyright law, mechanical reproduction of a work in another format is unlikely to result in a new, separate work. Therefore, digital enhancement or changing the format of a work without some originality, such as expressive enhancement or coding choices, is unlikely to create a separate work for copyright purposes. The creative bar is low, but it`s not non-existent. As a result, in some jurisdictions, publishing a photo under a CC license will give the public permission to reuse the photo in a different resolution. For version 3.0 and earlier, Creative Commons also offered scoped versions of its six core licenses for many jurisdictions (which usually correspond to countries, but not always). These ported licenses are based on the suite of international licenses, but have been modified to reflect local nuances in the formulation of legal terms, protocol creation, and language.
Both scope and international licenses should be legally valid everywhere. CC expects few, if any, ports to be required for version 4.0. Nein.CC offers its licenses, codes and tools to the public free of charge and without obligation. You do not need to register on Creative Commons to apply a CC license to your material. It is valid as soon as you apply it to material that you have the right to license. Creative Commons licenses have been carefully designed to make them legally enforceable in countries around the world. Database providers should also carefully consider which elements of the database should be covered by the CC legal instrument and identify these elements so that re-users can see and understand them. For more information on the clear distinction between unlicensed content, please visit our [marker page]wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking_your_work_with_a_CC_license “Wikilink”). Note that many countries have ported CC licenses to different jurisdictions around the world. These scoped licenses differ only in the fact that they have been modified to reflect local nuances in the formulation of legal terms, the development of protocols and, of course, the language. Both scope and international licenses should be legally valid everywhere. For the purposes of this international course, we use unported licenses designed for worldwide use and enforceability without further modification.
Data or other content contained in the database is subject to copyright if it is sufficiently creative. Original poems contained in a database would be protected by copyright, but not purely factual data (such as gene names or urban population). The facts are not subject to copyright, nor are the ideas underlying the copyrighted content. We release these new materials with the hope and expectation that you will help us adapt and improve them over time. What would make licensing more understandable to you? Do you think CC or CC licensors could take to facilitate compliance with licence conditions? When do you think it is appropriate to enforce licences in court? We look forward to hearing your feedback and working together to ensure that enforcement is fair to licensors and licensees, thereby strengthening rather than threatening the commons. The goal of U.S. copyright law is to give you legal protection for your original creative work so you can control who can benefit from it and when. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization created to provide creators of original works with an easier way to give others permission to use their original creative work than U.S. copyright laws allow. Copyright grants authors a set of exclusive rights to their creative works, generally including at least the right of reproduction, distribution, exhibition and adaptation. The term “all rights reserved” is often used by owners to indicate that they reserve all rights granted to them by law. When copyright expires, the work falls into the public domain and the rights holder can no longer prevent others from engaging in these copyright activities, with the exception of moral rights, which in some jurisdictions are reserved for authors.
Creative Commons licenses offer creators a range of choices between retaining all rights and relinquishing all rights (public domain), an approach we call “Certain Rights Reserved.” You must also indicate if you have modified the work, for example: if you have taken a section or cropped a photo. (For versions prior to 4.0, this is only necessary if you have created a customization by contributing your own creative material, but it is recommended even if it is not necessary.) There is no need to pay attention to trivial changes, such as correcting a typo or changing a font size. Finally, you should keep a note on previous changes to the job. In practice, if your photo is creative enough to get copyright protection, people will likely have to comply with license terms when reproducing your entire photo verbatim, unless there is an applicable exception or limitation such as fair dealing. However, they would not have to comply with the conditions of licence if they reproduced only those parts of the work that had fallen into the public domain. This is because your copyright in derivative works only extends to the material you contribute, not to the underlying work. If you have software developers, system administrators, or other technical expertise, please join our developer community and help create the tools that create Commons. In addition, creative works sometimes include works owned by third parties (known as “third-party content”), often used under a CC license or under a copyright exception or limitation such as fair dealing in the United States.
You must ensure that you have permission to use the third-party content contained in the work you wish to use or that your use is otherwise permitted by the laws of your jurisdiction, particularly in cases such as fair dealing, where your right to use the content depends on the particular context in which you intend to use it.