Copyright: In simple words it means right to make copies of a work like a book.In the contemporary world it applies to any human creative output. It is one of the parts of broader term intellectual property. Copy right act prevents unpermitted exploitation of the original work. The act of unauthorized use of original work leads to violation of copyright act and is known as copyright infringement.To facilitate the legitimate use of original work, owner may offer a private or public license. Creative commons license is a variety of public license.Who are creative commons? Creative commons is an organization founded in 2001.
The organization has a mission of helping to build a globally accessible public commons of knowledge and culture. They provide ‘Creative Commons’ licenses to individual or organizations .With these licenses owner(licenser) of copyright grants permission to(licensee) use their original work.‘Commons’ in this context means resources held in common by the society.Latest version is Creative Commons 4 released in 2014.Under this 11 types of licenses arepossible. Among these 7 are commonly used and I will briefly note 3 of the most widely used licenses.
Public domain: Identified as CC0(zero). This is the least restricted license and frees the content globally.Second variety is attribution. Identified as CC BY. This license allows user to share ,remix and to create derivatives from the original work. Suffix ‘BY’ refers to the preposition ‘by’ as used in the phrase ‘written by”. Essential requirement is to give credit(attribution)to the creator of the original work.Third type is attribution combined with ‘share alike’. This license is identified as CC BY-SA.This allows derivatives from original work, however they need to be licensed under the same license that is governing the original work. Rest of the CC licenses are of either non commercial (NC) or ‘no derivatives’ nature.