Original Creative Commons licenses

The original set of licences all grant the "baseline rights". The details of each of these licences depends on the version, and comprises a selection of four conditions:

• Attribution (by): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.
• Non-Commercial (nc): Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only for non-commercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works (nd): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based on it.
• ShareAlike (sa): Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work.

Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "nd" and "sa" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses.


There are thus six regularly used licenses:
Attribution alone (by)
Attribution + Non-commercial (by-nc)
Attribution + No Derivative works (by-nd)
Attribution + ShareAlike (by-sa)
Attribution + Non-commercial + No Derivative works (by-nc-nd)
Attribution + Non-commercial + ShareAlike (by-nc-sa)


Besides licenses, Creative Commons also offers an easy way to release material into the public domain through the Public Domain Dedication , as well as Founder's Copyright through which the work is released into the public domain after 14 or 28 years.



More on original licenses