Copyright is the exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, sell, or distribute the matter and form of a creative work. Copyright holders can grant permission for others to use their content. These permissions are called licenses, and the resulting products are called derivative works. Traditionally, these licenses have been granted on a case-by-case basis, requiring every person seeking a license to contact the creator for every use.

WHAT ARE THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES?

Creative Commons (CC) licenses provide an alternative to traditional copyright and give people “a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work” (Creative Commons). A CC license allows the creator to attach a license to a work that indicates what they will and won’t allow others to do with their work.

There are several CC licenses with different levels of permission. Each of these licenses provides conditions for appropriate use and offers the flexibility of permissions that traditional copyright lacks. These are also called open licenses, a category that includes other kinds of licenses used for things like open-source software.

Open licenses are critical to open textbooks because they grant the public, including students and faculty, the right to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute educational content without charge. In addition to lowering the cost of education, the most permissive CC licenses also allow faculty and students the freedom to adapt content to make it their own. With the exception of “No Derivatives” licensed work, CC-licensed works can be edited to a more manageable length, updated with more current information, amended with local content, translated, re-ordered, annotated, expanded and reused from semester to semester.

The CC-BY license is recommended for open textbooks because it allows the most freedom, and it is the only license that enables all of the 5 Rs without restriction. The only restriction is acknowledgment of the original author of the work.

You can use the Creative Commons License Chooser to select the appropriate license for your work.

For help writing an attribution statement, use the Open Attribution Builder from the  Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.

CC-BY: Attribution
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made to the original material.

CC-BY-SA: Attribution-Share Alike
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works must share the same license as the original material. This means that if someone remixes your work, or makes a new project that uses your work, they must also license that work under a CC-BY-SA license.

CC-BY-NC: Attribution-Non Commercial
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work for any non-commercial use, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made to the original material.

CC-BY-ND: Attribution-No Derivatives
Anyone is free to share the work, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works may not be distributed. This means that you can make a remix or new project that makes use of the original work for private use, but cannot share or publish your derivative work.

CC-BY-NC-SA: Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike
Anyone is free to share & adapt the work for any non-commercial use, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works must share the same license as the original material.

CC-BY-NC-ND: Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives
Anyone is free to share the work for any non commercial use, as long as they give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made to the original material. Any derivative works may not be distributed.