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8.1.4: Creative Commons

  • Page ID
    261532
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    Creative Commons licenses are based on the principles of copyright, but make works "freely available for legal use, sharing, repurposing, and remixing" by "any member of the public" (Use & Remix). The resource you are reading right now is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC) BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that it can be shared, remixed, adapted, or built on as long as credit is given.

    There are six Creative Commons licenses:

    CC BY

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    CC BY-SA

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    CC BY-NC-SA

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    (About CC Licenses).

    If you are creating a work and want to give it a CC license, the License Chooser can help you “select the appropriate license for your work” (License Chooser). These licenses can be tricky to use, however, partly because when works that are CC-licensed are reused, new works need to be licensed under the same, or a compatible license. This chart makes it easy to sort out which licenses are compatible:

    An infographic explaining CC license compatibility
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): CC License Chooser. (Copyright Kennisland)

    Google allows you to search for CC-licensed images from their main search page. As illustrated below, under Tools, select Usage Rights, and then Creative Commons licenses. Be sure to double check licensing before using any images you find this way.

    An image showing how to filter for usage rights on Google image search.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Google image search; CC licenses. (Copyright Sara Klein)

    If you would like to see what CC-licensed content is available in a variety of media, including music, videos, and more, and from many different resources, you can use Openverse, the Creative Commons search tool:

    An image of the CC Openverse search page.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Openverse CC content finder. (Copyright Openverse)

    Remember that these licenses are meant to work with copyright. No matter how you are using CC-licensed content, you still need to cite your sources according to the content’s original license.


    This page titled 8.1.4: Creative Commons is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Sarah Klein.

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