4 Benefits of using Creative Commons licences
Open licences support creators that want to share their works freely and allow other users more flexibility to reuse and share the creators’ works.
Specific benefits include:
- Allowing others to distribute the work freely, which in turn promotes wider circulation than if an individual or group retained the exclusive right to distribute.
- Reducing or eliminating the need for others to ask for permission to use or share the work can be time-consuming, especially if the work has many authors.
- Encouraging others to improve and add value to the work continuously; and
- Encouraging others to create new works based on the original work – e.g., translations, adaptations, or works with a different scope or focus.
Scholarly content such as journal articles and books are typically licensed under an open licensing system, the most popular being the Creative Commons (CC) licensing system.
CC licences provide everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, a CC licence on a copyrighted work answers the question, “What can I do with this work?”.1
Breaking down the CC licences
Creative Commons licenses are made up of four conditions that can be mixed and matched to create six different license combinations.
The licenses also come in three formats:
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human-readable
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lawyer-readable, and
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machine-readable.
Video
Watch this video about the benefits of using Creative Commons licences.
A Shared Culture from Creative Commons on Vimeo.
Attribution: Text is a derivative of Guide to Open Licensing by Open Knowledge International, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
1 This paragraph is reproduced from About CC Licenses. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/
