Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) licencing is a form of licencing that can be applied to copyrighted works by the copyright owner that allows those works to be used freely and by anyone, within certain bounds.

This popular licencing standard requires no fee or specific registration; it is applied simply by including a note detailing which of the six Creative Commons licences applies. See "About CC licenses" (Creative Commons) for details, but in short, each licence includes an indication that credit must be provided to the originator, and:

• Whether or not adaptions are allowed, and whether adaptations have to be shared under the same terms
• Whether or not the work can be used for commercial purposes

The six Creative Commons licenses (Image by progressor from Pixabay )

The above images show a graphical representation of each of the six Creative Commons licences which may be applied to a particular work, either by including one of these images or just the text within them:

• CC is in all of the licenses and indicates that a Creative Commons license applies to a given work.
• BY means that attribution is necessary (i.e. you must explicitly state who the work you're using or adapting is BY)
• SA stands for "Share Alike," which, if present in the license applied to a work, you must reshare the original work or any derivatives you produce from it with a CC license that is at least as permissive.
• NC stands for "NonCommercial," which means that you can only reuse or adapt the work for noncommercial purposes (i.e. you can't charge anyone to see or use it).
• ND stands for "No Derivatives": you can reshare or include this work in something you produce, but you must not rework it in any way.

An example of a Creative Commons license in use can be seen at the bottom of the sidebar on this site (I have added a screenshot on this page too, below): the text version says:

CC BY 4.0

This means that it's a Creative Commons (CC) license that you can use, reshare and adapt any part of it in any way you like as long as you provide appropriate attribution (BY), i.e. telling people where you got it from (by linking back to the relevant page or post, for example). "4.0" indicates the version of the license used at the time of licensing: they are updated and refined occasionally.

Exceptions to the licensing above used on this site occur where I have reused or adapted other people's work to incorporate into my site. In these cases, I have included the originator's license, which takes precedence over the one applied to this, and a link back to the original work (or the version that I used, if that is itself a derivative.

How can I find Creative Commons licensed imagery?

Creative Commons licensed imagery can be found via a Google image search:

Just visit Google, search for something you'd like a picture of, and then:

1. Click "images"
2. Click "Tools"
3. Click "Usage rights" and choose "Creative Commons Licenses"

It is important to double-check the license attached to an image that you choose as Google is not foolproof, but this is a good method for narrowing the search for Creative Commons licensed imagery.

Other potential sources of digital images offered under a Creative Commons license include Pixabay and Unsplash.