0.5 Creative approaches and alternatives  (Page 3/7)

The license options

Creative Commons offers a set of six licenses from which authors and artists can  choose online .

The CC licenses are combinations of one, two or three of the following four elements:

• Attribution (BY): You let others use your work but only if they give credit the way you request. Attribution is required for all Creative Commons licenses.
• Non-Commercial (NC): You let others use your work but for noncommercial purposes only. This does not mean that works cannot be used for commercial purposes, but that a separate license must be obtained by a user who wishes to use the work commerciallys.
• Non Derivative (ND): You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it. The right to make adaptations can be licensed under a separate agreement.
• Share Alike (SA): You allow others to make derivatives from your original work but they are permitted to distribute derivative works only under the same terms as the license that governs your work, or a license that is compatible with those terms. SA is used to prevent people from taking something from the commons and then locking it up by using a more restrictive license.

The license terms, “Non Derivative” and “Share Alike,” are not compatible and cannot be found in the same license. This is because it doesn't make sense to tell people they should incorporate your work and share it alike while also telling them they may not make derivative copies of it.

All of the licenses are non-exclusive. In other words, authors are free to enter into other agreements with specific users. For example, it is possible for copyright holders who have issued CC licenses to enter into fee-bearing licenses for rights to engage in activities not covered by the CC license in question. In this way a songwriter might release her music for free on the Internet and still charge a company for using it in a commercial.

Creative Commons licenses do not address an author's moral rights in any country except Canada. Accordingly, a work that is governed by even the most liberal Creative Commons license may still be subject to certain restrictions on use, in accordance with your country's provisions on moral rights.

Creative Commons, like the copyright regime as a whole, has no registration system; it merely provides information for authors who wish to license their works on nontraditional terms.

The Creative Commons website provides a simple quiz asking creators what freedoms they'd like to allow with their work. It then gives the creator a choice of appropriate licenses from which to choose. The quiz also allows the author to specify which country's laws will govern the license. Currently, the Creative Commons license has been translated or "ported" to the laws of 52 countries, and many more countries are currently under development.

Once a creator has selected a license, she attaches this license to copies of her work, thus alerting users to what they can and cannot do. If the work is (or is offered through) a website, the author can do this by adding to the site a piece of HTML code that generates a button with the Creative Commons logo containing a link to the license at issue.