Informationsplattform Open Access: Creative Commons Licences

Creative Commons Licences

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organisation which offers various standard licence agreements by means of which authors can grant rights of use in their work to the public. These licences are freely accessible on the Internet and are compatible with various Web applications. They are both sturdy enough to stand up in court and worded in such a way that they can be understood by people who do not have a legal background. The licences differ in terms of the freedoms they grant: they range from licences which reserve almost all rights to licences which release the work into the public domain thereby completely relinquishing copyright.

How to choose a CC licence

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Degrees of freedom afforded by Creative Commons Licences

Because, as a basic principle, works licensed under CC licenses may be reproduced and distributed by anyone, these licences are completely OA-compliant. Since the licences were developed for authors and creative artists, they also include the right to perform the work  publicly. These rights are granted on condition that the creator of the work (the author, composer or artist) be named, the source of the work be given (in the case of online distribution, a URI, preferably in the form of a URN or a DOI) and a link to the licence be inserted.

In the current version of the CC licences, instead of or in addition to naming the author, the name of a funding institution or a project can be given. The licensor has the option to grant to the public further rights which he/she holds as author. These include the right to use the work for commercial purposes and the right to produce and distribute derivative works. Conditions may be imposed on the distribution of derivative works. For example, it can be required that such works be distributed only under the same licence terms as the original work (the so-called share-alike or copyleft condition). 

The above-mentioned basic licence elements - attribution, commercial use, distribution of derivative works with or without the obligation to retain the same licence as the original work - can be used to generate six licence variations. CC licences are irrevocable. In other words, once granted under licence, rights cannot be recovered. On the other hand, however, it is indeed possible to re-license the work with less rights reserved. In addition, there are some more recent licence modules which were developed for music files and either allow sampling or just the distribution of the unmodified original music.  

Furthermore, the Science Commons project develops strategies and tools which promote the concept of Open Science on the basis of CC licences and are aimed at removing unnecessary barriers to the Web-based exchange of research data among scientists and scholars.

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Criticism of Creative Commons Licences

  • The short version of the licence is not sufficient to understand what it is about: In order to be able properly to understand the rights granted (for example modification, distribution) further reading is required which many users may not do. 
  • Lack of compatibility with other licences:The problem here is the clause permitting the distribution of derivative versions only under the same licensing terms as the original (or perhaps under the next-higher current version of the licence). This provision is referred to as "copyleft" (or in CC-terminology "share alike") and it serves to maintain free access to modified versions. However, in the case of two works under different copyleft licences (for example, GNU GPL and Creative Commons), it is not legally possible to combine them into a new work and to distribute the result. Each licence claims exclusive validity to the exclusion of the other. One possible solution is to license the new work under both licences and to leave it up to the processor to choose which licence should apply. However, the scope of GNU and of CC is not identical. GNU excludes certain rights which are included in CC and vice versa. The practice of double licensing is however quite common; for example, it is widespread in the media collection Wikimedia Commons. In the case of doubly licensed files, users can choose the licence under which they wish to use and distribute the file. 
  • Compatibility problems within Creative Commons itself: In the case of the "share- alike" condition ("SA"), problems can also arise within CC projects when some of the content used does not exclude commercial use (for example "BY-SA") but the project as a whole does (or vice versa). This is because "share alike" implies that identical terms and conditions apply to the end-product. Therefore, content which is "BY-SA" and content which is "BY-NC-SA" cannot simply be mixed.
  • The CC licences which are non-commercial ("NC") and which do not allow derivative works ("ND", no derivatives) do not comply with the requirements of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access which include the entitlement to produce and distribute derivative works.
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Links for further reading

Further links

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