NB - Creative Commons Australia is conducting a public consultation process for its v3.0 licence upgrades until August 2008. If you are interested in CC licensing, we’d love to hear your feedback on our proposed licences. For more information, see here.

A brief explanation of the Creative Commons licence types.

Offering your work under a Creative Commons licence does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any taker, and only on certain conditions.

Each work licensed under a Creative Commons licence comes with some base rights, which can be modified by mixing and matching the licensing terms below. You can use more than one of these terms in your licence, to define exactly how you are happy for your work to be used. For example, you may want to release your work under an Attribution licence, or you may want to use an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence.

Attribution
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This applies to every Creative Commons work. Whenever a work is copied or redistributed under a Creative Commons licence, credit must always be given to the creator.

NonCommercial
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Lets others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.

for example: Gus publishes his photograph with a Noncommercial licence. Camille incorporates a piece of Gus’s image into a collage poster. Camille is not allowed to sell her collage poster without Gus’s permission.

No Derivative Works
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Lets others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

for example: Sara licenses a recording of her song with a No Derivative Works licence. Joe would like to cut Sara’s track and mix it with his own to produce an entirely new song. Joe cannot do this without Sara’s permission (unless his use amounts to fair dealing).

Share Alike
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Allows others to distribute derivative works only under a licence identical to the licence that governs your work.

note: A licence cannot feature both the Share Alike and No Derivative Works options. The Share Alike requirement applies only to derivative works.

for example: Gus’s online photo is licensed under the Noncommercial and Share Alike terms. Camille is an amateur collage artist, and she takes Gus’s photo and puts it into one of her collages. This Share Alike language requires Camille to make her collage available on a Noncommercial plus Share Alike licence. It makes her offer her work back to the world on the same terms Gus gave her.

A full list of the Australian licences is included below.

Still going over your head? The Creative Commons international site has more examples in their about section.

See also the baseline rights and restrictions in all licences section for an explanation of the rights covered by Creative Commons licences.

The think page on the Creative Commons international site discusses some things you may want to consider before using the Creative Commons licences.

Australian Licences
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* Attribution
* Attribution-ShareAlike