Creative Commons Licenses

Work through the tutorial Using CC Licenses: Collections, Adaptations/Derivative Works and Remixes.

When reusing CC licensed material licensees have some considerations:

• Read the license itself, not just the deed, to understand the license.
• Make sure you can do what you want to do given any restrictions or limitations of the license on the original work, for example, whether or not the license permits derivatives. 
• Know which parts of a CC licensed work may be reused and under which circumstances. CC licensed works may have multiple different underlying licenses.
• Provide attribution and share adapted works with the proper license that does not violate terms of the original underlying licenses. For example, if the original work is shared under an SA license, then you must use an SA license to share the adapted work.
• See the CC Wiki for further explanation about considerations for licensees.

A fundamental purpose of using Creative Commons licenses is to promote sharing or reuse of works. 

Except for works with public domain designations, CC licensed works indicate to potential reusers exactly how the original work may be reused. In other words, underlying copyrights protect original creators from having their work shared or reused, but when they apply a CC license to a work they are telling reusers what the permissible reuses are. The terms adaptation, remix, and derivatives are often used to refer to the same type of reuses, but there are some differences.

Collections: All Creative Commons licensed material, and public domain material as well, can be assembled into a collection. An anthology is a type of collection.

Adaptations & derivatives: Some new form of originality or creativity should be applied to the work to be considered an adaptation. Some types of adaptations or derivatives are:

• translations
• creation of a screenplay from a short story
• putting sound in time to moving images

Remixes: Use more than one piece of original content to create a new work. The new work will typically have additional content added by the remixer. Types of remixes include:

• altering and combining blocks of text(s) for a new text
• mixing different material into a new work as in a collage
• mixing several sound files into a new work

Note: Format changes are permissible and do not generally constitute adaptations. For example, a CC BY-ND licensed sound file in the .ogg format may be converted to the .wav format and the new file may be shared without violating the license (as long as the content itself was not altered).