Creative Commons

Because the licenses are irrevocable, it is very important to carefully consider the options before deciding to use a CC license on a work. You should own or control copyright in the work to which you apply the license. The best way to decide which license is appropriate for you is to think about why you want to share and how you hope others will use your work.

Creative Commons Australia created this useful chart to help you decide:

You can also make use of the Creative Commons license chooser, a wizard taking you through steps to decide which license is the most suitable for your work.

Like the licenses, CC0 has its own chooser, if you want to dedicate your work to the public domain. Complete the required fields, agree to the terms, and then get the metadata 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.

When you find a CC work you want to reuse, the single most important thing to know is how to provide attribution. All CC licenses require that attribution be given to the creator. (Remember that unlike the CC licenses, CC0 is not a license but a public domain dedication tool, so it does not require attribution in its terms. Nevertheless, giving credit or citing the source is typically considered best practice even when not legally required.)

The elements of attribution are simple, though generally speaking, the more information you can provide, the better. People like to understand where CC licensed works come from, and creators like to know their names will remain attached to their works. If an author has provided extensive information in their attribution notice, retain it where possible. See the Attribution box on this page for the TASL approach.

An important consideration when copying works (as opposed to remixing - see the box below) is the NonCommercial restriction. If the work you are using is published with one of the three CC licenses that includes the NC element, then you need to ensure you are not using it for a commercial purpose.

Combining and adapting CC-licensed works is where things can get a little tricky. 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 licenses. But what if you are changing a CC licensed work or incorporating it into a new work? Are you, in other words, creating an adaptation? 

An adaptation 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.. 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.

Generally, the following apply when you remix CC licensed works:

• If the underlying work is licensed under a NoDerivatives license, 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 license, then ShareAlike applies to your adaptation and you must license it under the same or a compatible license. More on this below. 
• You need to consider license compatibility. License 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.

Here is a license compatibility chart that will help you determine if the underlying work may be adapted/remixed:

CC License Compatibility Chart - CC BY 4.0