Creative Commons is worth additional consideration both because of its growing adoption by creators of original works and because we should encourage our students to use it for licensing their own work. To reiterate, Creative Commons provides a licensing structure that encourages use of our work by others, while still letting us retain some control over how it is used. Creative Commons licenses are beginning to be used more and more widely. They are used, for example, in various ways by Google, the White House, Wikipedia, Flickr, and MIT for their Opencourseware.

Creative Commons offers six licenses, based on whether others can modify the work or not, and if so whether they have to provide the same license to to others (three options), and whether the work be used commercially or not (two options).

To choose a license from their website, go here. Once you have chosen the appropriate license, you can place the license on your work. Below is a guide to the meaning of the Creative Commons marks (taken directly from their website), which you can also see here.

Attribution CC BY This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution-NoDerivs CC BY-ND This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft" free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can't change them in any way or use them commercially.