CC has never asserted copyright in the text of our licenses or other legal tools. We made our policy clearer a few years ago by specifically declaring they are released under CC0. The text of the licenses, public domain tools, and license deeds we publish are all unrestricted by copyright worldwide, and we recently added a sentence to that effect in the notice at the bottom of our licenses and CC0.

No copyright ≠ no rules

Although these materials are public domain as a matter of copyright, the Creative Commons name and logo are our trademarks and can only be used according to our trademark policy.

This can be a difficult concept to communicate: while we want people to freely reuse the texts of our legal tools and deeds, we don’t want to give people the wrong idea about what we enable and what we do not: the difference between copyright and trademark can be complicated.

We’ve had a long-standing policy against use of our trademarks or name in connection with modified versions of our legal tools and other products (like our deeds). We’ve tried to make this policy simple and understandable, and just updated it for added clarity, though substantively nothing has changed from when CC published the first licenses in 2002. In a nutshell, we need to be sure the public is not confused about what comes from and is supported by Creative Commons, and what isn’t. We need to be sure the public doesn’t associate CC with other content and materials. While we hope this is simple enough to need no further explanation, if you want to reuse CC materials in a way that uses or associates our name or logos, please see our trademark policy to be sure you’re in the clear or contact CC.

Credit where credit is due

We appreciate and want credit for our work! We just don’t require it as a condition of exercising rights that we control under copyright.

Even though CC0 imposes no legal obligation to provide attribution, courtesy, good practice, norms, and community expectations often mean that you should give credit anyway. (For example, we recommend CC0 for scientific data, but many reusers include source information, both to acknowledge others’ work and to establish the data’s provenance.) Giving proper credit helps others understand the origin of the text so they can learn more and identify any changes that have been made. That may not always be reasonable or possible, but in any case we won’t be using copyright as a means to enforce our request for credit.

For more information, you might find our guidelines for using public domain material instructive.

(Trade)mark our words…

We strongly recommend against any modifications of our licenses and other legal tools. However, if you choose to change the text of our legal tools either directly through edits or indirectly through additional terms, such as terms of use on your website, you may not claim that your offering(s) are under Creative Commons, and you may not call the modified result a CC legal tool. You are free to link to us, talk about us, cite us, and yes, criticize us by name without infringing our copyright or trademark rights. However, you may not use or associate our name or brand with a license or any other legal tool of your own.

What about license proliferation?

Creative Commons provides a standard set of licenses suitable for a wide variety of uses and situations. Our licenses reduce the need for custom licenses that create separate pools of material under incompatible terms (i.e. “license proliferation”). By choosing not to use copyright to restrict modifications of CC license text, we recognize we may be encouraging license proliferation, because people will feel free to remix the content and publish their own, new custom license.

This is a fair criticism, but it fails to account for the reality that those wanting different terms will make that happen with or without repurposing our text. We believe our efforts are better focused on explaining the rationale for standard licensing, and helping creators understand that as much as they may think they need specialized terms, that those sometimes (if not often) work against their sharing goals and inflict more harm than provide benefit. This includes additional transaction costs for them and their reusers, who are forced to understand specialized terms unique to the custom license.

Withholding permissions and exercising copyright in legal tools are hardly effective tools in this campaign against license proliferation—those who want their own licenses will make that happen whether or not we impose some rights reserved (or even all rights reserved) on the text of our legal code. We will, however, continue to strongly encourage would-be custom license creators to use our standard licenses, which have a long history and a thriving user base as well as robustness internationally, rather than creating new custom and incompatible licenses and legal tools.

Let’s share!

We believe in creating a vibrant commons, that maximizes the ability of others to build upon our works with the least restrictions possible. We hope you will consider joining us by using CC0 for your own materials!

The post Why Creative Commons uses CC0 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Our thanks and congratulations to the translation team of Maarten Zeinstra (CC-NL, translation coordinator), Lucie Guibault (CC-NL, legal lead), Yannick H’Madoun (CC-BE), Lisette Kalshoven (CC-NL), Tamara Mangelaars (Kennisland, editor), Tiara Roquas (CC-NL intern), and Tessa Askamp (CC-NL, technical interpreter). Additional help was provided by law students from the Institute of Information Law (Rutger de Beer, Sarah Johanna Eskens, Sam van Velze, Marco Caspers, and Alexander de Leeuw), and CC’s own regional coordinator (and native Dutch speaker) Gwen Franck.

The post Dutch translation of 4.0 published appeared first on Creative Commons.

If it seems like you just saw them featured here, you’re not mistaken; they published the first official translation of the 4.0 suite just a few months ago, and now they are the first to have the complete set of CC legal tools available in their language.

Our thanks and congratulations again to the team of Maria Rehbinder of Aalto University, legal counsel and license translation coordinator of CC Finland; Martin von Willebrand, Attorney-at-Law and Partner, HH Partners, Attorneys-at-law Ltd: for translation supervision; Tarmo Toikkanen, Aalto University, general coordinator of CC Finland; Henri Tanskanen, Associate, HH Partners, Attorneys-at-law Ltd: main translator, and Liisa Laakso-Tammisto, translator, with thanks to Aalto University, HH Partners, and the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture for their support.

Update: CC Finland’s announcement (in Finnish).

The post Finnish translation of CC0 published appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re excited to see this work progressing as more people are able to use the CC licenses in their own language. Look for a few translations from outside the Nordic region—including some involving teams from several continents!—in the near future.

The post Norwegian translation of 4.0 published appeared first on Creative Commons.

Internationalization was one of the 5 main goals of the 4.0 licenses, so this is an important milestone for the CC community. Our translation policy was written to reinforce that goal: if the licenses work everywhere, everyone should be able to use them in their own language without needing to worry about what the original English version says. The official translations are accessible to anyone, anywhere wishing to have access to the official legal text of the 4.0 licenses in Finnish.

Particular kudos go out to this team for their detailed work: producing linguistic translations is difficult! Many words don’t have exact equivalents between languages, especially where you’re bringing in specialized language from countries with different legal systems. Teams working on translations go through a detailed review of their work with CC to ensure that the meaning of the documents lines up. This often involves many detailed questions about exact meanings of words and the legal concepts they refer to, especially when no one on the CC legal team speaks the language. (If you’re particularly curious, you can look at some of the notes in the translators’ guide.) The Finnish team anticipated most of the questions we might have asked, providing a detailed explanation that will be useful as an example to others, and their thorough work has paid off.

Keep your eyes out: several more translations are in the final stages of review and will be published in the coming months! In the meantime, we join CC Finland in celebrating the launch of the first official 4.0 translation.

Read CC Finland’s announcement.

The post Finnish translation of 4.0 published appeared first on Creative Commons.

There are many people who deserve congratulations on this accomplishment. This is often the case for translation projects, but it is especially true with French! According to the translation policy for our legal tools, we will be publishing only one official translation per language—for all of its speakers worldwide. This isn’t so difficult for some languages, which are primarily spoken in only one country. But with French-speaking countries around the world, many teams had to take part in this project so that the final text works for everyone, even across regional variations in language.

CC France did the tremendous task of leading the effort, coordinating their own team as well as others from Algeria, Belgium, Cameroon, Canada, Luxembourg, Morocco, Senegal, Switzerland, Tunisia, and collaborators from Framasoft.org and VeniVidiLibre.org.

The CC0 translations, as well as the upcoming translations of 4.0, are as close as possible to the original English, keeping the same legal meaning. Under our new translation policy, these will all be considered equivalent: anyone linking to the legal code may use any language. We think everyone should be able to understand the legal tools they’re using, and toward that end, we put a lot of thought into simplifying the language in 4.0. But it should be true in a language everyone can read–and thanks to the translation efforts of our affiliates, we are coming closer to this goal.

There are many more translation projects of CC0 and of 4.0 in progress; expect to see more announcements in the coming months! (You can take a look at the list of projects in progress.) To get involved with an existing translation project or begin a new one, please see the translation policy for information on getting started.

The post CC0 official translation into French published appeared first on Creative Commons.

Compatibility with the ShareAlike licenses is now one step closer. After a month-long consultation, we have published our process and criteria for ShareAlike compatibility and are ready to begin evaluating candidate licenses. Licenses named as compatible under this process will be interoperable with the CC ShareAlike licenses, allowing more remixing of ShareAlike-licensed materials with other copyleft materials in the commons.

In the new process, CC will evaluate licenses by publishing a preliminary analysis and then holding a public community discussion. Candidate licenses must have a few basic characteristics, including a copyleft mechanism and some way of handling attribution. Additional considerations to take into account include the license’s treatment of Effective Technological Measures, and any additional conditions that the license imposes.

It has long been a goal of Creative Commons to make our ShareAlike licenses interoperable with other copyleft licenses. Larry Lessig has been writing about the importance of compatibility to the commons since before 3.0 was published, and a compatibility mechanism was included in 3.0 but never used.

We will be looking at the first candidate license in the next few weeks. If you would like to be involved in the discussions, please follow the cc-licenses list.

The post Compatibility process and criteria published appeared first on Creative Commons.

Photo: Golan Levin, CC-BY 2.0

We are now opening the discussion for our compatibility process and criteria for the ShareAlike licenses. As established in the drafting process, 4.0 includes a compatibility mechanism that allows for other licenses to be compatible with the ShareAlike licenses, allowing for greater interoperability of freely-licensed content, but no other licenses have been approved as compatible yet. We are looking to the CC community to help us develop the criteria and process before formally evaluating licenses as candidates for ShareAlike compatibility, and to kick off this discussion, we now have a draft posted for feedback: ShareAlike compatibility process and criteria.

We want this to be a process that the CC community trusts, and so this is a first draft, not a final document. We invite everyone to participate in the discussion on the license development list; it will end on May 28.

The post ShareAlike compatibility process and criteria discussion opens appeared first on Creative Commons.

This is not just the first CC0 translation—it is the first official translation of any international CC legal tool. Under CC’s new legal code translation policy, translation teams work closely with CC Legal to create official linguistic translations of the original English text. These translations are equivalent to the original English: when you create or reuse a CC0 work, you may now refer to either English or Dutch. (You can read more about official translations in our new FAQ entry.)

We are excited to mark this event. CC0 and the 4.0 licenses are designed to be as fully international as possible, and to support that goal, they should be available in languages everyone reads. (Ported versions of 3.0 and earlier have generally been published in the official language(s) of the appropriate jurisdiction, but the ported licenses are not equivalent to the international licenses and may not be substituted as references.) Working with our affiliate teams to produce official translations is a detailed, painstaking endeavor, involving a lot of correspondence on precise word choices, and the first teams have been tremendously helpful to us as we developed the process. There are several teams currently working on more translations of CC0 and the 4.0 licenses, so look for more announcements in the coming months.

CC0 was launched in 2009, and is designed to allow creators to dedicate their work to the public domain by waiving all their copyright and neighboring and related rights in a work, to the fullest extent permitted by law. If the waiver isn’t effective for any reason, then CC0 acts as a license granting the public an unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use the work for any purpose. CC0 has been adopted widely by institutions, governments, and individuals for data and other material that can be freely reused without restriction.

All language versions of CC0 now indicate that official translations are available.

The post First CC0 official translation in Dutch appeared first on Creative Commons.

You can view the initial announcement to the license development list, and the announcement of the new revision and final discussion period.

Many of you are familiar with the existing statement of intent on the scope of ShareAlike, made in preparation for Wikipedia’s migration from GFDL to CC BY-SA, which we wrote about in 2008. This statement isn’t a replacement for it; instead, it will be a supplement to the commitments made there. The 10 items in the current discussion draft include a commitment to a public discussion process for all future license versions, as well as a commitment not to narrow the scope of future versions (though it could be expanded). Items 9 and 10 of the draft are proposals included for consideration, but are unlikely to appear in the final document.

We are discussing the development of this statement on the license development list before publication so that the CC community can provide its thoughtful guidance and feedback before we make this long-term commitment. (You can sign up here to join the discussion.) It will remain open for comment until February 21.

Update (February 19): After hearing community feedback, we’ve decided not to publish this now, but instead to revisit it at a later date as more general versioning principles for all of the CC licenses.

The post Discussion period open for Draft ShareAlike Statement of Intent appeared first on Creative Commons.