This section describes the most common form of open licence: the Creative Commons set of licences.
Creative Commons licensing lets you know how the original author would like their material to be reused, while they retain the copyright.
Other open courses have explained the creative commons licence system very well, so rather than repeat their guidance in this course we suggest you explore the following for concise explanations about open licences, why they are used and how to use them:
For reference, the main types of CC licence, which can be combined, are as follows (see also Figure 1):
Note that a licence cannot feature both the Share Alike and No Derivative Works options. The Share Alike requirement applies only to derivative works.
OpenLearn - 4 Using existing free content Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.