Creative Commons license

There are a number of public copyright licences available, one of which is called a Creative Commons (CC) licence. This licence makes it possible for an otherwise copyrighted "work" to be freely distributed. When an author wishes to provide other individuals the permission to copy, distribute, and build upon a work that the author has produced, the author will utilise a Creative Commons licence. People who use or redistribute an author's work are protected from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they adhere to the conditions that are specified in the licence by which the author distributes the work. Creative Commons gives an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work), and it protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement.

There are many different kinds of Creative Commons licences to choose from. Each licence is distinct due to a number of possible permutations that determine the stipulations of its distribution. The non-profit organisation Creative Commons, which was established in the United States in 2001, was the one who decided to make them available to the public for the first time on December 16, 2002. Additionally, there have been a total of five iterations of the suite of licences, numbering from 1.0 all the way up to 4.0. The most recent version of the licencing suite, version 4.0, was made available for download in November of 2013. Despite the fact that the Creative Commons licence was initially based on the legal framework of the United States, there are currently a number of Creative Commons jurisdiction ports that may handle laws from other countries.

The "Open Definition" for content and data was deemed by the Open Knowledge Foundation to be conformant with the Creative Commons CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC0 licences in October of 2014. This decision was made.