LEARNING OUTCOMES
- Differentiate the meaning of different CC icons
- Identify the three layers of CC licenses
THE BIG QUESTION: WHY IT MATTERS
Given that most of us are not lawyers, what do we need to know about the legalities in order to use CC licenses properly?
Creative Commons’ legal tools were designed to be as accessible to everyone as possible while still being legally robust. CC’s founders made several design decisions that make these legal tools relatively easy to use and understand.
PERSONAL REFLECTION: WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU
Have you ever come across a CC-licensed Flickr image that you really liked but were afraid to use because you weren’t sure of the legal terms and conditions? Have you ever been frustrated because you didn’t understand how to decide which of the CC legal tools to use for your own work?
Acquiring Essential Knowledge
Copyright operates by default under an “all rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons licenses function within copyright law, but they utilize a “some rights reserved” approach. While there are several different CC license options, all of them grant permission to use the works under certain standardized conditions. The licenses grant those permissions for as long as the underlying copyright lasts or until/unless you violate the license terms. This is what we mean when we say CC licenses work on top of copyright, not instead of copyright.
The CC licenses were designed to be a free, voluntary solution for creators who want to grant the public up-front permission to use their works. Although the licenses are legally enforceable tools, they were designed in a way that was intended to make them accessible to non-lawyers.
The licenses are built using a three-layer design (figure 3.1).
- The legal code is the base layer. This contains the “lawyer-readable” terms and conditions that are legally enforceable in court. Take a minute and scan through the legal code of CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode) to see how it is structured. Can you find where the attribution requirements are listed?
- The commons deeds are the best-known layer of the licenses. These are the web pages that lay out the key license terms in “human-read-
