The act of applying a CC license is easy, but there are several important considerations to think through before you do.

Checklist by evondue dedicated to the public domain using CC0.

Learning Outcomes

• Name the most important considerations before applying a CC license or CC0
• Apply a license and CC0 using CC’s Choosers
• Evaluate which license to apply based on relevant factors

Big Question / Why It Matters

What should creators consider before applying a CC license or CC0 to their work? There are several options for creators who choose to share using CC. There are also many things to think about before applying any CC license or CC0, including whether you have all the rights you need and if not, how you must indicate that to the public.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

How would you go about choosing a particular CC license for your work? Do you know how to go about actually attaching a license to your work once you have chosen one? What if you change your mind about the license?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Before you decide that you want to apply a Creative Commons license or CC0 to your creative work, there are some important things to consider:

The licenses and CC0 are irrevocable. Irrevocable is a fancy word for a legal agreement that cannot be canceled. That means once you apply a CC license to a work, the CC license applies to the work until the copyright on the work expires. This aspect of CC licensing is highly desirable from the perspective of reusers because they have confidence knowing the creator can’t arbitrarily pull back the rights granted them under the Creative Commons license.

Because the licenses are irrevocable, it is very important to carefully consider the options before deciding to use a CC license on a work.

You must own or control copyright in the work. You should control copyright in the work to which you apply the license. For example, you don’t own or control any copyright in a work that is in the public domain, and you don’t own or control the copyright in a Britney Spears song. Further, if you created the material in the scope of your employment, you may not be the holder of the rights and may need to get permission from your employer before applying a CC license. Before licensing, be mindful about whether you have copyright in the work to which you’re applying a CC license.

Which Creative Commons license should I use?

The six Creative Commons licenses provide a range of options for creators who want to share their work with the public while still retaining copyright. The best way to decide which license is appropriate for you is to think about why you want to share and how you hope others will use your work.

For example, here are a few questions to consider:

Do you think people might make interesting new works out of your creation? Do you want to give people the ability to translate your writing into different languages, or otherwise customize it for their own needs? If so, then you should choose a license that allows your work to be adapted.

Is it important to you that your images are able to be incorporated into Wikipedia? If so, then you should choose CC BY, BY-SA, or CC0, because Wikipedia does not allow images licensed under any of the NonCommercial or NoDerivatives licenses except in limited circumstances.

Do you want to give away all of your rights in your work so that it can be used by anyone in the world for any purpose? Then you might want to think about using the public domain dedication tool, CC0.

If you need some help deciding which license might be best for you, this flowchart from CC Australia might be useful (please note the information it contains is not legal advice): http://creativecommons.org.au/learn/fact-sheets/licensing-flowchart/

Which Creative Commons license is right for me by CC Australia, licensed under CC BY

How do I actually go about applying a CC license to my work?

Once you’ve decided you want to use a CC license and know which license you want to apply, applying it is simple. Technically, all you have to do is indicate which CC license you are applying and include a link (or write out the URL, if you are working offline) to the relevant deed or legal code. You can do this in the copyright notice for your work, on the footer of your website, or any other place that makes sense in light of the particular format and medium of your work. The important thing is to make it clear what the CC license covers and locate the notice in a place that makes that clear to the public.

It can be as simple as this notice from the footer of Wikimedia Commons:

If you are on a platform like Medium or Flickr, you should use the built-in tools on the platform to mark your own work with a license and identify yourself as the author. If you have a personal blog or a website, we recommend using the CC license chooser to generate code that identifies your chosen license. That code can be copied and inserted into your work online.

Take some time to play around with the CC license chooser now. After you select the boxes that indicate your preferences, the chooser generates the appropriate license based on your selections. Remember, the license chooser is not a registration page, it simply provides you with standardized HTML code and license statements.

 

Sidebar: How to apply CC0

Like the licenses, CC0 has its own chooser. If you want to dedicate your work to the public domain, you can go to https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/waiver. Complete the required fields, agree to the terms, and then get the metadata to mark your work with CC0.

If you want to mark the work in a different way or need to use a different format like closing titles in a video, you can visit https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads/ and access downloadable versions of all of the CC icons.

Whatever method you use to mark your content, there are several important steps to properly mark your content.

There are three main aspects of marking a work:

1. Marking your own work so that others can easily discover and reuse it

An example here from an article in the PLOS Biology journal:

2. Indicating if your work is based on someone else’s work – If your work is a modification or adaptation of another work, indicate this and provide attribution to the creator of the original work. You should also include a link to the work you modified and indicate what license applies to that work.

Another example:

3, Marking work created by others that you are incorporating into your own work

Another example, from a Saylor Academy course:

In every case, the goals are the same: you want to make it easy for others to know who created what parts of the work, identify the terms under which any given work, or part of a work, can be used, and provide information about works you used to create your new work or incorporated into your work.

The best way to do this is to follow the TASL approach for your own portions of the content, and for the portions of the content created by others:

T = title
A = author (tell reusers who to give credit to)
S = source (give reusers a link to the source of any third party material you used)
L = license (tell reusers what license applies to which content and provide a link to the relevant deed(s))

For more examples of how to mark your own work in different contexts, spend some time looking through CC’s extensive marking page.

Final remarks

There is no single answer for which CC license is the best, or even for how to mark your work. The best rule of thumb is to remember why you are sharing and then make your choices with that intention in mind.