What are Creative Commons and Creative Commons (CC) licenses? Why are they important?
Creative Commons (CC) is an international nonprofit whose goal is to make knowledge and culture accessible to everyone, in order to create a better future; the organization stresses "contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable" sharing.
Creative Commons licenses (CCLs) open up a broad range of possibilities and opportunities that are essential for creating, remixing, and sharing OER. Further underscoring the focus on DEI initiatives in association with OER in this guide, CC's open licensing and "public domain tools allow everyone across the globe a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works, ensure proper attribution, and allow others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works" (Creative Commons: What We Do).
Creative Commons licenses are at the heart of the OER movement.
Original works are automatically protected under U.S. and international copyright. Rather than replacing copyright, CCLs allow for various degrees of protection for published works, giving the creator some additional flexibility in determining how their materials can be used, and allowing freer use of copyrighted materials by others.
"CCLs have three layers of code: a standard legal code approved by attorneys, a human-readable code available for the average person’s comprehension, and a machine-readable code that includes a summary of key freedoms and obligations that are written into a format that software, search engines, and other technologies can understand" (Seibert, Miles, & Geuther, 104).
Further, "CCLs have six easy-to-read and understandable icon-based licenses... [see below]. These icons can be combined in various ways depending on the creator’s desired criteria for use of their work. Each icon defines how the work can be used. All licenses include the “BY” icon and term for attribution; some include the “NC” icon for “NonCommercial,” which dictates only non-commercial use of the work; the “ND” for “NoDerivatives” means that there can be no modifications of the work, although it can still be shared; and the “SA” for “ShareAlike” means that any changes or sharing of the work must also be shared with the original CCL" (ibid.).
You'll want to become familiar with CCLs and what they do when using OER. Here is a snapshot:
