Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that develops standardized licenses and tools enabling creators to grant public permissions for their works while retaining copyright.

Creative Commons license: A standardized copyright license that lets creators authorize specified uses of their works under stated conditions. These licenses are the organization’s main way of granting public permissions.
Open educational resources: Teaching and learning materials that are openly licensed or in the public domain, permitting reuse and adaptation. Creative Commons licenses give educators clear permissions to adapt and share learning materials.
Lawrence Lessig: An American legal scholar known for work on copyright, internet regulation, and the founding of Creative Commons. He helped establish Creative Commons and articulated the need for flexible copyright permissions.
CC0: A Creative Commons legal tool designed to waive copyright and related rights to the fullest extent possible. Unlike the standard licenses, CC0 is designed to dedicate works to the public domain.
Attribution (copyright): A requirement to credit a work’s creator when reusing it. Every Creative Commons license requires attribution to the creator.
Open access: Free online access to scholarly research, often accompanied by reuse rights. Researchers and publishers use Creative Commons licenses to specify reuse rights for articles.
Aaron Swartz: An American programmer and activist who advocated for open access and a freely accessible internet. His early work contributed to Creative Commons’ technical and public-interest efforts.
GNU General Public License: A copyleft software license requiring distributed derivative works to remain under the same license. It targets software and imposes source-sharing obligations that differ from Creative Commons’ general-purpose licenses.
Share-alike: A licensing condition requiring adaptations to be distributed under the same or a compatible license. This condition keeps downstream adaptations openly reusable under compatible terms.
Wikimedia Commons: A media repository of freely licensed and public-domain images, audio, video, and other files. Its media files commonly use Creative Commons licenses to communicate reuse terms.

Linked from 13 pages