WHAT IS CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE?

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license

 

As we go into the 3D printing domain, there are some copyright terms that we need to be familar with, especially when it concerns the downloading of 3D printing models to be used. 

 

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

 

There are several types of CC licenses. The licenses differ by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001. Click here to go to their website.

 

What is Applicable?

In the 3D printing industry, work that is licenced under a Creative Commons licence is governed by applicable copyright law and licences which fall under this is applied to copyright, and this includes books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, and websites. However, Creative Commons does not recommend the use of Creative Commons licenses for software.

 

However, application of a Creative Commons license may not modify the rights allowed by fair use or fair dealing or exert restrictions which violate copyright exceptions. Furthermore, Creative Commons licenses are non-exclusive and non-revocable. Any work or copies of the work obtained under a Creative Commons license may continue to be used under that license.

 

In the case of works protected by multiple Creative Common licenses, the user may choose either.

 

Types of Licences

The CC licenses all grant the "baseline rights", such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work worldwide for non-commercial purposes, and without modification. The details of each of these licenses depends on the version, and comprises a selection out of four conditions:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Definitions by Wikipedia:

 

Attribution in copyright law, is acknowledgement as credit the copyright holder of a work. The most fundamental form of attribution is the statement of the copyright holder's identity, often in the form Copyright (C) copyright holder's-name. The preservation of such a notice is invariably required until and unless a work has entered the public domain[citation needed]. Author attribution beyond such a notice is sometimes required by licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons licenses.[1]

Attribution is often considered as the most basic requirements made by a license, as it prevents others from claiming fraudulently to own the work and allows a copyright holder to accumulate a positive reputation that partially repays their losses. In cases when copyright holder is author himself it is regarded as a sign ofdecency and respect to acknowledge the creator by giving him/her credit for the work.

 

 

Share-alike is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licences that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar licence as the original. Copyleft licences are free content or free software licences with a share-alike condition.

Two currently-supported Creative Commons licences have the ShareAlike condition: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (a copyleft, free content licence) and Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (a proprietary licence).

The term has also been used outside of copyright law to refer to a similar plan for patent licensing.

 

Non-commercial (also spelled noncommercial) refers to an activity or entity that does not, in some sense, involve commerce, at least relative to similar activities that do have a commercial objective or emphasis.[citation needed] For example, advertising-free community radio stations are typically nonprofit organizations staffed by individuals volunteering their efforts to air a wide variety of radio programming, and do not run explicit radio advertisements, included in the United States specific grouping of "non-commercial educational" (NCE) public radio stations. Some Creative Commons licenses include a "non-commercial" option, controversial in definition and application.

 

 

Derivative Works - In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyright-protected elements of an original, previously created first work (the underlying work). The derivative work becomes a second, separate work independent in form from the first. The transformation, modification or adaptation of the work must be substantial and bear its author's personality to be original and thus protected by copyright. Translations, cinematic adaptations and musical arrangements are common types of derivative works.

Most countries' legal systems seek to protect both original and derivative works.[1] They grant authors the right to impede or otherwise control their integrity and the author's commercial interests. Derivative works and their authors benefit in turn from the full protection of copyright without prejudicing the rights of the original work's author.

 

The last two clauses are not free content licenses, according to definitions such as DFSG or the Free Software Foundation's standards, and cannot be used in contexts that require these freedoms, such as Wikipedia. For software, Creative Commons includes three free licenses created by other institutions: the BSD License, the GNU LGPL, and the GNU GPL.

 

Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses and five are not. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "ND" and "SA" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses. Of the eleven valid combinations, the five that lack the "BY" clause have been retired because 98% of licensors requested attribution, though they do remain available for reference on the website. This leaves six regularly used licenses:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For example, the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) license allows one to share and remix (create derivative works), even for commercial use, so long as attribution is given.

 

Definitions by Wikipedia:

 

Free/Libre - Free content, libre content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work. A free cultural work is one which has no significant legal restriction on people's freedom:

• to use the content and benefit from using it,

• to study the content and apply what is learned,

• to make and distribute copies of the content,

• to change and improve the content and distribute these derivative works.[1][2]

Although there are a great many different definitions in regular everyday use, free content is legally very similar if not like an identical twin to open content. An analogy is the use of the rival terms free software and open source which describe ideological differences rather than legal ones.[3]

Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the freedoms mentioned above. Because copyright law in most countries by default grants copyright holders monopolistic control over their creations, copyright content must be explicitly declared free, usually by the referencing or inclusion of licensing statements from within the work.

 

Rights

 

Attribution

Since 2004, all current licenses require attribution of the original author (the BY component). The attribution must be given to "the best of [one's] ability using the information available".

Generally this implies the following:

• Include any copyright notices (if applicable). If the work itself contains any copyright notices placed there by the copyright holder, those notices must be left intact, or reproduced in a way that is reasonable to the medium in which the work is being re-published.

• Cite the author's name, screen name, or user ID, etc. If the work is being published on the Internet, it is nice to link that name to the person's profile page, if such a page exists.

• Cite the work's title or name (if applicable), if such a thing exists. If the work is being published on the Internet, it is nice to link the name or title directly to the original work.

• Cite the specific CC license the work is under. If the work is being published on the Internet, it is nice if the license citation links to the license on the CC website.

• Mention if the work is a derivative work or adaptation, in addition to the above, one needs to identify that their work is a derivative work, e.g., “This is a Finnish translation of [original work] by [author].” or “Screenplay based on [original work] by [author].”

 

Non-commercial licenses

Further information: Creative Commons § Other criticism of the non-commercial license

The "non-commercial" option included in some Creative Commons licenses is controversial in definition, as it's sometimes unclear what can be considered a noncommercial setting, and application, since its restrictions differ from the principles of open content promoted by other permissive licenses.  In 2014 Wikimedia published a guide to using Creative Commons licences as wiki pages for translations and as PDF. 

 

Please click here for more detailed information on Creative Commons Licence from Wikipedia.

Please click here to select the right licence.

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