Creative Commons Licences & Using Sourced Material
Nothing puts the fear of God into creatives more than the subject of copyright and trying to successfully navigate this minefield. As creatives we are copyright holders ourselves, and the work we go on to create is subject to our own copyright. So it’s natural that we would want to use creative commons material in a responsible way, and with the correct attribution.
In this short guide, I will cover the basics behind creative commons licences, how you can use the material available under these licences in your work and how you can distribute your own work under these licences.
Throughout this article, I will be referring to these licences by their names ascribed by Creative Commons, which is an international nonprofit organisation that helps administer creative commons licences. You can find out more about creative commons licences on the Creative Commons website, where there is also a range of tools designed to help creatives chose the correct licence when sharing their own work under a creative commons licence.
Creative Commons Licence Types
Public Domain or CC0 1.0 Universal
The CC0 1.0 Universal denotes that an image or artwork is in the public domain. This means it is copyright free and can be used by anybody, and can be distributed, remixed, adapted, and built upon in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes.
Using public domain source images in your work (for example, if you are creating collages) allows you to do anything your want with them and hence this kind of material is ideal for repurposing.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
CC BY 4.0 licence is pretty similar to public domain works, except that as a condition of the licence you must credit its creator. This means that you can use the work for any purpose, but you must include a credit somewhere, for example in the image’s caption.
how to attribute source images
In practical terms, if you use any source material which requires attribution in your work, you must take note of the original creator and attribute them somewhere.
This is usually not a problem if you are dealing with the modern work distributed under any kind of attribution licences, but when working with old source material (for example, scans of old book illustrations) it might be difficult to find the name of the original artist. In this case, do your best to do so or alternatively consider crediting the original publication.
If you are working with the online resources, take note of the original material’s (e.g. a book or a journal) publication date, and if it was published back in the 19th century or early 20th century, it is highly likely that the material should be in the public domain by now and it was mislabelled by whoever published it online. Remember that the copyright credit goes to the original creator, not to the library, institution or an individual the work is distributed by.
If you are considerably modifying the source material (for example, if you are creating a collage) and it is not used as a single main element of the new work which hugely resembles the original, attribution is still desirable, but in practice it can get a little tricky, particularly if you are using a lot of different source images in your work, so it is always safer and easier to go for source images which are either in public domain or don’t require attribution.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 licence can be used for any purpose with attribution, but also requires that any adaptations of the work are re-licensed under the same conditions as the original. This means that if someone used your work which includes creative commons materials used under this licence, then they must also do so with the same creative common licence, and are bound by the same terms and conditions.
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
A lot of these different licence types are really about specifying different conditions or ways in which material can and cannot be used. So this next licence type is a more restrictive variant, whereas most of the conditions are the same, but derivatives or adaptations of the work are not permitted. This means that you can use the material for any purpose as it is, including commercial ventures, but cannot produce a derivative or adapted version of the work.
Non-Commercial Licences
Apart of all the previous licences which one way or another allow you to use the work in commercial projects, there are also a range of Creative Commons licences for non-commercial applications.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
The Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 licence is a non-commercial licence, meaning that you can only use the work in non-commercial projects. Other than that, you can still produce derivative or adapted versions and you must credit the work’s original creator.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
This licence is similar to the previous one (attribution, non-commercial), but with the extra ‘ShareAlike’ clause, meaning derivatives and adaptations of the work must be made under the same licence terms.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
The final licence type administered by Creative Commons is the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 which is non-commercial, and no adaptions of the work are permitted. Credit must be given to the work’s original creator.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 is the best type of licence to assign to your own projects when sharing online (for example, on the portfolio websites such as Behance), if you don’t want anyone making adaptations of your work even for non-commercial projects, but you still want your work to be easily shareable, for example, on blogs.
Working with copyright and creative commons does not have to be a scary process, and a lot of what I have covered here is common sense and about working with materials in a responsible way.
When searching through online image archives always look for the work’s creative commons license. This is usually displayed in the material’s caption or at the bottom of the page and will tell you how it can be used and if there are any particular stipulations denoting its usage.
A lot of the time source materials are provided under a particular creative commons license because of the licensing organisation: for example, they might be a public body, like a library, or a charitable organisation. Please try to respect and work with the creative commons license conditions because it enables us to have all of this great source material to use in our own work.
If you are looking for public domain (and creative commons) images to use in your work, be sure to check out top favourite resources which you can find in our post Online Public Domain Image Archives.
