Although Creative Commons licenses have been around since 2001, they are still largely unknown to the general public.
Below, we’ll describe each of the different types of uses that can be made of this type of license, which are somewhere in between the classic “All rights reserved” and “No rights reserved”.
To begin with, we can define them as licenses that allow others to use your work (any type of work, such as video, photo, article, etc.) under certain conditions previously determined by the author.
Different types of Creative Commons licenses
Currently, there are six different types of Creative Commons licenses, which we will analyze from least to most restrictive:
- Licencia CC BY: You don’t mind your work being modified, including for use in other works, and generally anyone can use it, including for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you. A person who wants to use your work must mention the author without any other restrictions.
- Licencia CC BY-SA:This license operates like the previous one, but with one condition: all derivative works must be protected under this same license. This ensures that works derived from yours remain under the same conditions. This is the method used by Wikipedia, which requires that if you use Wikipedia to write an article, you must “protect” your article with a CC BY-SA license to allow similar use of your content.
- Licencia CC BY-ND: Allows any type of use, including commercial use, as long as the work is not modified and the author is credited.
- Licencia CC BY-NC: Allows any use except for commercial purposes. Again, the author must be credited, but it’s not necessary for the new work to be protected under the same BY-NC license.
- Licencia CC BY-NC-SA: Does not allow commercial use, and any derivative work must be protected under the same BY-NC-SA license.
- Licencia CC BY-NC-ND: This is the most restrictive license of all, as it only allows redistribution of the work with proper credit. It does not allow modification or commercial use.
Now that you know what a Creative Commons license is, how can you use it?
To incorporate a work licensed under CC or protect your own work, you need to meet all three layers of recognition:
- Image: This is the human-readable layer. Each license has a corresponding icon or image that identifies which one it is (such as the photo at the top of this page).
- Legal code: the legal terms and conditions of each license.
- Machine-readable code: each license has its own code that must be included in the work so it can be read by machines.
Summary
CC licenses are a very valuable tool for sharing knowledge and are easy to implement in digital environments. If you have any questions about how to use them, you can access the following link or contact us.
Lastly, as an example, this article will be protected under the CC BY license.
This work is licensed under licencia de Creative Commons Reconocimiento 4.0 Internacional.
