Creative Commons Attribution license (or CC-BY) is an open license, which allows reuse of a creative work (e.g. writing, images, audio or video) for any purpose provided attribution is given to the original author. The license (in a "human readable form") can be found at Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported - different versions exist for different languages and legal regimes.

Being an open license, reuse may occur for

  • commercial or non-commercial uses
  • whether the original author approves or not

It is not a copyleft license - that is, it does not have a share alike clause to restrict reuse to compatible licenses.

The downside of this is that someone could reuse the content, modify it, and then not share - for example using it in copyrighted works, or in a more restrictive open license (CC-BY-SA, GFDL, or FAL) or the "not quite open" CC-BY-NC-SA, any of which would prevent the original user from using the adaptations in their own work. In this sense, the CC-BY license is the most generous of open licenses, but offers the least safeguards for those who care about such things. However, attribution remains a requirement in all cases - this will not be attractive to someone who does not want to share credit at all - so in theory, a license requiring attribution offers as much protection as copyright does against use without attribution.

In practice, those reusing the work may misunderstand the license - is this an issue, and is it any worse than than the improper use of copyrighted material which happens anyway?[expansion needed]

Marking your work[edit | edit source]

Marking your work is important to ensure it is indexed as open content by search engines. (E.g. in Google, click advanced search and select usage rights).

Creative Commons provide a way of doing this - see Marking your work as Creative Commons.

See also[edit | edit source]

FA info icon.svg Angle down icon.svg Page data
Authors Chris Watkins
License CC-BY-SA-3.0
Language English (en)
Related 0 subpages, 5 pages link here
Aliases CC-BY, CC-by
Impact 810 page views
Created April 20, 2009 by Chris Watkins
Modified January 24, 2023 by Irene Delgado
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