There is a very good Creative Commons copyright license overview entitled “The beauty of ‘Some Rights Reserved’: Introducing Creative Commons to librarians, faculty, and students” [http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crlnews/2008/nov/beautyofsrr.cfm] by Molly Kleinman [http://mollykleinman.com/ which is excerpted here:
“…Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that created a set of simple, easy-to-understand copyright licenses. These licenses do two things: They allow creators to share their work easily, and they allow everyone to find work that is free to use without permission. The value of those two things is enormous. Before Creative Commons licenses, there was no easy way a creator could say, “Hey world! Go ahead and use my photographs, as long as you give me attribution.”
Similarly, there was no place for members of the public to go to find new works that they were free to reuse and remix without paying fees. Creative Commons changed all that. As it says on its Web site, ‘Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright—all rights reserved— and the public domain—no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work—a ‘some rights reserved’ copyright.’2
The licenses come in three languages: Human Readable, which is a very brief and easy-to-understand summary of what is permitted and under what conditions; Lawyer Readable, which is a legally binding three-page deed; and Machine Readable, which is the metadata, a little snippet of code that makes it possible for search engines like Google to search by Creative Commons license, and return only those works that are free to reuse.
There are six major Creative Commons licenses that all include different combinations of four basic requirements:
Attribution: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work—and derivative works based upon it —but only if they give you credit the way you request. This element is a part of all six licenses.
Non-Commercial: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work —and derivative works based upon it—but for noncommercial purposes only.
No Derivatives: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only exact copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike: You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work…”
