How to Reference Creative Commons Licenses

Unlike "copyright," the Creative Commons license allows people to adapt and share your work.

The Creative Commons provides an alternative to highly restrictive "copyright" statements, falling under the more liberal "copyleft" school of licensing. Creative Commons licenses explicitly give people the right to, depending on the creator's desire, copy the work, redistribute it, sell it or create new works derived from the first one. To reference one of these licenses, find the one that's most appropriate for you and follow the instructions provided by the Creative Commons.

Instructions

1. Navigate to the Creative Commons' website (See Resources). Click on the "Choose License" button beneath the dark green search box; this loads the Creative Commons' "Choose Your License" wizard that walks you through the process of selecting one of the Creative Commons licenses.

2. Choose whether or not you want your work to be available for commercial use, which can increase your work's visibility. For example, a photograph that allows commercial use might be made part of an advertising campaign. Similarly, because the website "Wikipedia" permits commercial usage of its content, it has been transferred to electronic devices and sold for offline access. If you want to allow commercial use, check the "Yes" button under "Allow commercial uses of your work?"; otherwise, check "no."

3. Click the circle that represents best how permissive you want to be with other people modifying your work. If you don't want anyone to be able to modify it, click "No" under the "Allow modifications of your work?" header; if you want people to create derivative works, choose "Yes." Creative Commons also allows you to restrict derivative works so that they can only be released if the creator similarly allows people to share and modify his work; if you want to include this restriction, choose "Yes, as long as others share alike."

4. Fill in the "Additional Information" boxes that include metadata about the work, such as what type of content it is, where it can be found online, the work's title and your name. When you're finished, click "Select a License."

5. Select and copy the HTML code in the text area, pasting it into the HTML code of the web page where your work is displayed. If your work is not on a webpage or doesn't support HTML, you can instead cut and paste the text beneath the licensing image, which will read something like this: "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License."

References

• Creative Commons: Frequently Asked Questions
• Creative Commons: About the Licenses

Resources

• Creative Commons