5 Benefits of Using Creative Commons Licences
Learning Objectives
To help you navigate the chapter, the following objectives outline the main themes and areas of inquiry we will examine:
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Explain the purpose of Creative Commons licences and how they enable creators to share their work freely while retaining copyright ownership.
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Identify the benefits of using Creative Commons licences, including wider distribution, reduced need for permission requests, opportunities for continuous improvement, and support for new works such as adaptations, translations, and remixes.
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Discuss the role of Creative Commons in supporting a shared culture, drawing on the transcript’s themes of creativity, participation, and global collaboration across borders.
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Describe how Creative Commons licences empower creators to choose the freedoms they grant, including conditions related to attribution, non-commercial use, derivative works, and share-alike requirements.
- Analyse how Creative Commons helps remove legal and structural barriers to creativity, allowing individuals and communities to build, remix, and collaborate with confidence.
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Reflect on how Creative Commons supports both amateur and professional creativity, as highlighted in the transcript, and how it enables communities to form around shared works.
Open licences support creators who want to share their works freely and allow other users greater flexibility to reuse and share them.
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, is typically licensed under an open licence, the most popular being the Creative Commons (CC) licence.
CC licences provide everyone, from individual creators to large institutions, with a standardised 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
Watch this video about the benefits of using Creative Commons licences.
Credit. A Shared Culture from Creative Commons on Vimeo.
Exercise 5.1
Benefits of Using Creative Commons
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to demonstrate the following skills and understandings.
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Summarise the purpose of Creative Commons licences and explain how they enable creators to share their work while maintaining copyright ownership.
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Identify and describe the key benefits of using Creative Commons licences, including wider distribution, reduced permission requests, opportunities for improvement by others, and support for new works such as adaptations or remixes.
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Explain how Creative Commons contributes to a shared global culture, drawing on examples of creativity, participation, and collaboration highlighted in the transcript.
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Distinguish the main conditions of Creative Commons licences and describe how creators can choose the freedoms they want to grant, such as allowing or limiting commercial use or derivative works.
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Discuss how Creative Commons licences reduce legal barriers to creativity, enabling individuals and communities to create, reuse, and build upon works with greater confidence.
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Reflect on how Creative Commons supports creative expression across both amateur and professional contexts, and how shared licensing encourages community engagement and the development of new cultural works.
Source: 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/
