60-412: A Creative Commons NonCommercial license ( CC NC , CC BY-NC or NC license ) is a Creative Commons license which a copyright holder can apply to their media to give public permission for anyone to reuse that media only for noncommercial activities. Creative Commons is an organization which develops a variety of public copyright licenses , and the "noncommercial" licenses are a subset of these. Unlike
120-486: A copyleft license. Libre licenses without share-alike terms are sometimes called permissive licenses . The Creative Commons public copyright license suite includes licenses with attribution, share-alike, non-commercial and no-derivatives conditions. It also offers a public domain license and the Founders' Copyright license. Open supplement licenses permit derivatives of the work (specifically material that supplements
180-686: A " Freeware " license model; examples are The White Chamber , Mari0 or Assault Cube . Despite the status of CC0 as the most free copyright license, the Free Software Foundation does not recommend releasing software into the public domain using the CC0 due to patent concerns. However, application of a Creative Commons license may not modify the rights allowed by fair use or fair dealing or exert restrictions which violate copyright exceptions. Furthermore, Creative Commons licenses are non-exclusive and non-revocable. Any work or copies of
240-593: A U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001. There have also been five versions of the suite of licenses, numbered 1.0 through 4.0. Released in November 2013, the 4.0 license suite is the most current. While the Creative Commons license was originally grounded in the American legal system, there are now several Creative Commons jurisdiction ports which accommodate international laws. In October 2014,
300-564: A URL leading to the photographer's Flickr page on each of their ads. However, one picture, depicting 15-year-old Alison Chang at a fund-raising carwash for her church, caused some controversy when she sued Virgin Mobile. The photo was taken by Alison's church youth counselor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under the Creative Commons license. In 2008, the case (concerning personality rights rather than copyright as such)
360-477: A compatible license, and making reference and attribution to the original license (e.g. by referring to the URL of the original license). The license is non-exclusive, royalty-free, and unrestricted in terms of territory and duration, so it is irrevocable, unless a new license is granted by the author after the work has been significantly modified. Any use of the work that is not covered by other copyright rules triggers
420-456: A given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work. There are several types of Creative Commons licenses. Each license differs by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002, by Creative Commons ,
480-574: A list of FSF-approved software licenses and free documentation licenses. The Open Source Initiative keeps a similar list of OSI-approved software licenses. The Open Knowledge Foundation has a list of OKFN-approved licenses for content and data licensing. The implied license imposed by the Berne Convention , and the public domain (the CC0 license as waiver ), are the references for any other public license. Considering all cultural works, as in
540-490: A non-profit educational publisher that released works under an -NC license, sued FedEx for violating the license because a school had used its services to mass-produce photocopies of the work, thus commercially exploiting the works. A U.S. judge dismissed the case in February 2017, ruling that FedEx was an intermediary, and that the provision of the license "does not limit a licensee's ability to use third parties in exercising
600-551: A number of content directories and search engines. After being proposed by Creative Commons in 2017, Creative Commons license symbols were added to Unicode with version 13.0 in 2020. The circle with an equal sign (meaning no derivatives ) is present in older versions of Unicode, unlike all the other symbols. meaning no derivatives meaning no rights reserved meaning share alike meaning non-commercial meaning Creative Commons license Public copyright license A public license or public copyright license
660-549: A public copyright license does not limit licensors either. Under this definition, license contract texts specific to a single licensor (like the UK government’s Open Government License, which would have to be edited to be used by other licensors) are not considered public copyright licenses, although they may qualify as open licenses. Some organisations approve public copyright licenses that meet certain criteria, in particular being free or open licenses. The Free Software Foundation keeps
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#1732771823110720-399: A public copyright license must allow licensees to share and adapt the licensed work for any purpose, including commercial ones. Licenses that purport to release a work into the public domain are a type of libre license. Share-alike licenses require derivatives of the licensed work to be released under the same license as the original. When a libre license has a share-alike term, it is called
780-430: Is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees. By applying a public license to a work, provided that the licensees obey the terms and conditions of the license, copyright holders give permission for others to copy or change their work in ways that would otherwise infringe copyright law. Some public licenses, such as
840-554: Is also governed by copyright law and CC licenses are applicable, the CC recommends against using it in software specifically due to backward-compatibility limitations with existing commonly used software licenses. Instead, developers may resort to use more software-friendly free and open-source software (FOSS) software licenses . Outside the FOSS licensing use case for software there are several usage examples to utilize CC licenses to specify
900-524: Is convinced that the defendant prevents communication of works whose management is entrusted to the plaintiff [SGAE], using a repertoire of authors who have not assigned the exploitation of their rights to the SGAE, having at its disposal a database for that purpose and so it is manifested both by the legal representative of the Association and by Manuela Villa Acosta, in charge of the cultural programming of
960-545: Is speculation that media creators often lack insight to be able to choose the license which best meets their intent in applying it. Some works licensed using Creative Commons licenses have been involved in several court cases. Creative Commons itself was not a party to any of these cases; they only involved licensors or licensees of Creative Commons licenses. When the cases went as far as decisions by judges (that is, they were not dismissed for lack of jurisdiction or were not settled privately out of court), they have all validated
1020-573: The BSD License , the GNU LGPL , and the GNU GPL . Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses and five are not. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "ND" and "SA" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses. Of the eleven valid combinations, the five that lack
1080-492: The CC0 , CC BY , and CC BY-SA licenses, the CC BY-NC license is considered non-free. A challenge with using these licenses is determining what noncommercial use is. In September 2009 Creative Commons published a report titled, "Defining 'Noncommercial'". The report featured survey data, analysis, and expert opinions on what "noncommercial" means, how it applied to contemporary media, and how people who share media interpret
1140-527: The GNU GPL and the CC BY-SA , are also considered free or open copyright licenses . However, other public licenses like the CC BY-NC are not open licenses, because they contain restrictions on commercial or other types of use. Public copyright licenses do not limit their licensees. In other words, any person can take advantage of the license. The former Creative Commons (CC) Developing Nations License
1200-466: The Open Definition , the four freedoms summarizes the main differences: The "open licenses" preserve the main freedoms of CC0, but add some reasonable restriction. Labeling by its acronyms, the main restrictions are: Free licenses are a popular subset of public copyright licenses. They include free and open source software licenses and free content licenses. To qualify as a libre license,
1260-709: The Open Knowledge Foundation approved the Creative Commons CC ;BY, CC BY-SA and CC0 licenses as conformant with the " Open Definition " for content and data. Lawrence Lessig and Eric Eldred designed the Creative Commons License (CCL) in 2001 because they saw a need for a license between the existing modes of copyright and public domain status. Version 1.0 of the licenses was officially released on 16 December 2002. The CCL allows inventors to keep
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#17327718231101320-513: The "BY" clause have been retired because 98% of licensors requested attribution, though they do remain available for reference on the website. This leaves six regularly used licenses plus the CC0 public domain declaration. The six licenses in most frequent use are shown in the following table. Among them, those accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation – the public domain dedication and two attribution (BY and BY-SA) licenses – allow
1380-566: The Chinese government adapted the Creative Commons License to the Chinese context, replacing the individual monetary compensation of U.S. copyright law with incentives to Chinese innovators to innovate as a social contribution. Work licensed under a Creative Commons license is governed by applicable copyright law. This allows Creative Commons licenses to be applied to all work falling under copyright, including: books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, and websites. While software
1440-572: The Dutch CC license and director of the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, commented, "The Dutch Court's decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and binds users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge of, the conditions of
1500-489: The Free Software Foundation currently does not recommend using CC0 to release software into the public domain because it explicitly does not grant a patent license. In February 2012, CC0 was submitted to Open Source Initiative (OSI) for their approval. However, controversy arose over its clause which excluded from the scope of the license any relevant patents held by the copyright holder. This clause
1560-447: The U.S. legal system in mind; therefore, the wording may be incompatible with local legislation in other jurisdictions , rendering the licenses unenforceable there. To address this issue, Creative Commons asked its affiliates to translate the various licenses to reflect local laws in a process called " porting ". As of July 2011, Creative Commons licenses have been ported to over 50 jurisdictions worldwide. Working with Creative Commons,
1620-486: The association, which is compatible with the alternative character of the Association and its integration in the movement called ' copy left '. On June 30, 2010, GateHouse Media filed a lawsuit against That is Great News. GateHouse Media owns a number of local newspapers, including Rockford Register Star , which is based in Rockford, Illinois. That is Great News makes plaques out of newspaper articles and sells them to
1680-576: The author and the license and added a link to the original. Langner was later contacted by the Verband zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums im Internet (VGSE) (Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property in the Internet) with a demand for €2300 for failing to provide the full name of the work, the full name of the author, the license text, and a source link, as is required by the fine print in
1740-475: The case on that count, ruling that the atlas was not a derivative work of the photograph in the sense of the license, but rather a collective work . Since the atlas was not a derivative work of the photograph, Kappa Map Group did not need to license the entire atlas under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license. The judge also determined that the work had been properly attributed. In particular, the judge determined that it
1800-566: The collecting society's claims because the owner of the bar proved that the music he was using was not managed by the society. In February 2006, the Cultural Association Ladinamo (based in Madrid, and represented by Javier de la Cueva ) was granted the use of copyleft music in their public activities. The sentence said: Admitting the existence of music equipment, a joint evaluation of the evidence practiced, this court
1860-442: The contrary, licensees may use third‐party agents such as commercial reproduction services in furtherance of their own permitted noncommercial uses. Because FedEx acted as the mere agent of licensee school districts when it reproduced Great Minds' materials, and because there is no dispute that the school districts themselves sought to use Great Minds' materials for permissible purposes, we conclude that FedEx's activities did not breach
Creative Commons NonCommercial license - Misplaced Pages Continue
1920-464: The current copyright regime also harms compatibility and that authors can lessen this incompatibility by choosing the least restrictive license. Additionally, the non-commercial license is useful for preventing someone else from capitalizing on an author's work when the author still plans to do so in the future. The non-commercial licenses have also been criticized for being too vague about which uses count as "commercial" and "non-commercial". Great Minds,
1980-661: The entire atlas. Drauglis sued the defendants in June 2014 for copyright infringement and license breach, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, fees, and costs. Drauglis asserted, among other things, that Kappa Map Group "exceeded the scope of the License because defendant did not publish the Atlas under a license with the same or similar terms as those under which the Photograph was originally licensed." The judge dismissed
2040-420: The following: The NonCommercial license allows image creators to restrict selling and profiting from their works by other parties and thus maintaining free of charge access to images. The "non-commercial" option included in some Creative Commons licenses is controversial in definition, as it is sometimes unclear what can be considered a non-commercial setting, and application, since its restrictions differ from
2100-641: The founder of Creative Commons, has contributed to the site. Unsplash moved from using the CC0 license to a custom license in June 2017 and to an explicitly nonfree license in January 2018. In October 2014, the Open Knowledge Foundation approved the Creative Commons CC0 as conformant with the Open Definition and recommend the license to dedicate content to the public domain. In July 2022 Fedora Linux disallowed software licensed under CC0 due to patent rights explicitly not being waived under
2160-537: The legal robustness of Creative Commons public licenses. In early 2006, podcaster Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos from Curry's Flickr page without Curry's permission. The photos were licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. While the verdict was in favor of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to him as long as they did not repeat the offense. Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, main creator of
2220-481: The license or violate Great Minds' copyright. Creative Commons license A Creative Commons ( CC ) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of
2280-613: The license. Due to either disuse or criticism, a number of previously offered Creative Commons licenses have since been retired, and are no longer recommended for new works. The retired licenses include all licenses lacking the Attribution element other than CC0, as well as the following four licenses: The latest version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses, released on November 25, 2013, are generic licenses that are applicable to most jurisdictions and do not usually require ports. No new ports have been implemented in version 4.0 of
2340-549: The license. Version 4.0 discourages using ported versions and instead acts as a single global license. Since 2004, all current licenses other than the CC0 variant require attribution of the original author, as signified by the BY component (as in the preposition "by"). The attribution must be given to "the best of [one's] ability using the information available". Creative Commons suggests the mnemonic "TASL": title – author – source [web link] – [CC] licence . Generally this implies
2400-479: The license. Of this sum, €40 goes to the photographer, and the remainder is retained by VGSE. The Higher Regional Court of Cologne dismissed the claim in May 2019. Creative Commons maintains a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through
2460-560: The license." In 2007, Virgin Mobile Australia launched an advertising campaign promoting their cellphone text messaging service using the work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to Flickr using a Creative Commons-BY (Attribution) license. Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation required. Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing
Creative Commons NonCommercial license - Misplaced Pages Continue
2520-611: The noncommercial license have a variety of conflicting understandings about what this should mean. Erik Möller raised concerns about the use of Creative Commons' non-commercial license. Works distributed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license are not compatible with many open-content sites, including Misplaced Pages, which explicitly allow and encourage some commercial uses. Möller explained that "the people who are likely to be hurt by an -NC license are not large corporations, but small publications like weblogs, advertising-funded radio stations, or local newspapers." Lessig responded that
2580-477: The original work) but not duplicates. A subset of public copyright licenses which aim for no restrictions at all like public domain ("full permissive"), are public domain-like licenses . The 2000 released WTFPL license is a short public domain like software license . The 2009 released CC0 was created as public domain license for all content with compatibility with also law domains (e.g. Civil law of continental Europe ) where dedicating into public domain
2640-458: The people featured in the articles. GateHouse sued That is Great News for copyright infringement and breach of contract. GateHouse claimed that TGN violated the non-commercial and no-derivative works restrictions on GateHouse Creative Commons licensed work when TGN published the material on its website. The case was settled on August 17, 2010, though the settlement was not made public. In 2007, photographer Art Drauglis uploaded several pictures to
2700-571: The photo-sharing website Flickr, giving them the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-SA). One photo, titled "Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD.", was downloaded by Kappa Map Group, a map-making company, and published in 2012 on the front cover of Montgomery Co. Maryland Street Atlas . The text "Photo: Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD Photographer: Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis, Creative Commoms [ sic ], CC-BY-SA-2.0"
2760-498: The principles of open content promoted by other permissive licenses . In 2014 Wikimedia Deutschland published a guide to using Creative Commons licenses as wiki pages for translations and as PDF. Rights in an adaptation can be expressed by a CC license that is compatible with the status or licensing of the original work or works on which the adaptation is based. The legal implications of large numbers of works having Creative Commons licensing are difficult to predict, and there
2820-437: The public license. Upon activation of the license, the licensee must adhere to all conditions of the license, otherwise the license agreement is illegitimate, and the licensee would commit a copyright infringement. The author, or the licensor as a proxy, has the legal rights to act upon any copyright infringement. The licensee has a limited period to correct any non-compliance. The CC licenses all grant "baseline rights", such as
2880-541: The report's claim that two-thirds of Creative Commons usage was with noncommercial licenses and that there was public confusion about how people should reuse such content. Various bloggers commented that the ambiguity which the report exposed provided supporting evidence of the need to establish clarification and certainty into what it means to apply the license and reuse media under the license. An examination of media use in biodiversity research publications reported that people both offering and reusing biodiversity media with
2940-522: The right to distribute the copyrighted work worldwide for non-commercial purposes and without modification. In addition, different versions of license prescribe different rights, as shown in this table: The last two clauses are not free content licenses, according to definitions such as DFSG or the Free Software Foundation 's standards, and cannot be used in contexts that require these freedoms, such as Misplaced Pages . For software , Creative Commons includes three free licenses created by other institutions:
3000-623: The rights granted [by the licensor]." Great Minds appealed the decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit later that year. The 2nd Circuit upheld the lower court's decision in March 2018, concluding that FedEx neither infringed copyrights nor violated the license. One of circuit judges Susan L. Carney argued in the court statement: We hold that, in view of the absence of any clear license language to
3060-676: The rights to their innovations while also allowing for some external use of the invention. The CCL emerged as a reaction to the decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft , in which the United States Supreme Court ruled constitutional provisions of the Copyright Term Extension Act that extended the copyright term of works to be the last living author's lifespan plus an additional 70 years. The original non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with
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#17327718231103120-476: The sharing and remixing (creating derivative works ), including for commercial use, so long as attribution is given. Besides copyright licenses, Creative Commons also offers CC0 , a tool for relinquishing copyright and releasing material into the public domain . CC0 is a legal tool for waiving as many rights as legally possible. Or, when not legally possible, CC0 acts as fallback as public domain equivalent license . Development of CC0 began in 2007 and it
3180-419: The term. The report found that in some aspects there was public agreement on the meaning of "noncommercial", but for other aspects, there is wide variation in expectation of what the term means. The Conference on College Composition and Communication commented that creators and re-users have their own biases and tend to interpret "noncommercial" in a way that favors their own use. Online magazine repeated
3240-476: The work obtained under a Creative Commons license may continue to be used under that license. When works are protected by more than one Creative Commons license, the user may choose any of them. The author, or the licensor in case the author did a contractual transfer of rights, needs to have the exclusive rights on the work. If the work has already been published under a public license, it can be uploaded by any third party, once more on another platform, by using
3300-468: Was added for scientific data rather than software, but some members of the OSI believed it could weaken users' defenses against software patents . As a result, Creative Commons withdrew their submission, and the license is not currently approved by the OSI. From 2013 to 2017, the stock photography website Unsplash used the CC0 license, distributing several million free photos a month. Lawrence Lessig ,
3360-413: Was not a public copyright license, because it limited licensees to those in developing nations . Current Creative Commons licenses are explicitly identified as public licenses. Any person can apply a CC license to their work, and any person can take advantage of the license to use the licensed work according to the terms and conditions of the relevant license. According to the Open Knowledge Foundation ,
3420-423: Was placed on the back cover, but nothing on the front indicated authorship. The validity of the CC BY-SA 2.0 as a license was not in dispute. The CC BY-SA 2.0 requires that the licensee to use nothing less restrictive than the CC BY-SA 2.0 terms. The atlas was sold commercially and not for free reuse by others. The dispute was whether Drauglis' license terms that would apply to "derivative works" applied to
3480-670: Was released in 2009. A major target of the license was the scientific data community. In 2010, Creative Commons announced its Public Domain Mark , a tool for labeling works already in the public domain. Together, CC0 and the Public Domain Mark replace the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, which took a U.S.-centric approach and co-mingled distinct operations. In 2011, the Free Software Foundation added CC0 to its free software licenses . However,
3540-558: Was sufficient to credit the author of the photo as prominently as authors of similar authorship (such as the authors of individual maps contained in the book) and that the name "CC-BY-SA-2.0" is sufficiently precise to locate the correct license on the internet and can be considered a valid identifier for the license. In July 2016, German computer magazine LinuxUser reported that a German blogger Christoph Langner used two CC BY -licensed photographs from Berlin photographer Dennis Skley on his private blog Linuxundich. Langner duly mentioned
3600-531: Was thrown out of a Texas court for lack of jurisdiction. In the fall of 2006, the collecting society Sociedad General de Autores y Editores ( SGAE ) in Spain sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, owner of a disco bar located in Badajoz who played CC-licensed music. SGAE argued that Fernández should pay royalties for public performance of the music between November 2002 and August 2005. The Lower Court rejected
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