Unit 3: Additional resources
3.2 Licence scope
- Creative Commons fair dealing and fair use FAQ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]
- Creative Commons public domain FAQ
- ‘Does a Creative Commons licence give me all the rights I need to use the work?’
- ‘Do Creative Commons licences affect exceptions and limitations to copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use?’
- ‘May I apply a Creative Commons licence to a work in the public domain?’
3.4 Licence enforceability
- ‘What happens if I offer my material under a Creative Commons licence and someone misuses them?’
- ‘How can I lose my rights under a Creative Commons licence? If that happens, how do I get them back?’
Official translations of CC legal tools
Creative Commons has a formal process for translation in order to ensure that the translations are as close to the original as possible. Its goal is to get the legal tools into as many languages as possible, so that everyone can read and understand the terms in their native language(s). The official translations are noted at the bottom of the legal code on all of the licences, and are equivalents of one another.
Many people ask about the relationship between the official translations and the English originals. All official translations are linguistic translations only, unlike porting. All the official translations are legal equivalents of one another, which means that while the licensor may have gone through the English-language version to apply a CC-BY licence to their work, a reuser of that work who speaks Arabic may view that very same licence in Arabic. This is similar to how standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium translate a single standard into many different languages, and how the United Nations publishes treaties.
Other resources
- ‘About the open publication license’ by David Wiley (CC BY 4.0):a brief history outlining open content licensing and why the licences were eventually replaced by the more robust Creative Commons licences.
- ‘Creative Commons licenses’ (CC BY-SA 3.0): a Wikipedia article outlining the licences and some use instructions.
- ‘About the licenses’ by Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0): to read all of the licence deeds or legal codes, visit this site and explore the different licences.