to answer a set of three yes-or-no questions, two combinations are off the table because an author cannot choose both “No Derivatives” (derivative works are forbidden) and “Share Alike” (derivative works are permitted so long as they are distributed under the same license terms). The remaining six possible combinations, accordingly, describe the basic family of Creative Commons licenses from which creators may choose: (1) Attribution only (BY); (2) Attribution-Share Alike (BY-SA); (3) Attribution-No Derivatives (BY-ND); (4) Attribution-Non-Commercial (BY-NC); (5) Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike (BY-NC-SA); and (6) Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives (BY-NC-ND).[1] Web sites, photographs, instructional materials, scholarly research, comic strips, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, and many other works—numbering in the hundreds of millions[2]—have been published under Creative Commons licenses.
All six of the standard Creative Commons licenses permit users to copy and distribute the licensed works, although the three “NC” licenses disallow copying and distribution for commercial purposes.[3] Four of the licenses (all except the two “ND” variants) also permit users to create and distribute modified works based on the licensed content, although the two “NC” variants again restrict commercial uses, and the two “SA” variants require retransmission of the same set of licensed freedoms to users of any such derivative works. The combined effect of all these alternatives is to give the licensor fine-grained control over the various policy decisions implicated in the other open-content licensing arrangements discussed above. Whether to allow derivative works, whether to require licensing reciprocity, whether to
- ↑ See License Your Work, supra note 128. The listing in the text arrays the licenses roughly in increasing order of restrictiveness. See, e.g., Goss, supra note 99, at 978; Maritza Schaeffer, Note, Contemporary Issues in the Visual Art Realm: How Useful are Creative Commons Licenses?, 17 J.L. & Pol’y 359, 385–87 (2008). Like the GNU GPL and the other licenses considered previously, the text of the Creative Commons licenses has been amended from time to time, with each amended version being assigned a revision number to differentiate it from its predecessors. When referring to works published under a Creative Commons license, it is customary to note the applicable version number of the license. See, e.g., Peter W. Martin, Reconfiguring Law Reports and the Concept of Precedent for a Digital Age, 53 Vill. L. Rev. 1, 1 n.* (2008) (“This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.”). To add a final layer of complexity, different versions of each Creative Commons license exist that are tailored to the particularities of different national legal systems, and where a particular jurisdiction’s version of the license applies, it is common to so note. See, e.g., Timothy K. Armstrong, Fair Circumvention, 74 Brook. L. Rev. 1 (2008) (adopting BY-SA-3.0-US license).
- ↑ See OECD, supra note 45, at 24 (“figures show that there are at least 200 million pieces of content on the Internet that are under various Creative Commons licenses (as counted by the number of ‘link-backs’ to these licenses on the Internet as tracked by Google)”).
- ↑ To be more precise, a party wishing to make a commercial use of a work licensed under one of the Creative Commons “NC” variants must seek dual licensing of the work from the copyright holder upon terms that allow such use. See Creative Commons, Frequently Asked Questions – CC Wiki, http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ (last visited Apr. 2, 2010) (“You can always approach the licensor directly to see if they will separately license you the commercial rights.”); supra note 31 and accompanying text (discussing dual licensing).
