Creative Commons licences are a set of six standardized public copyright licences \u2014 CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, and CC BY-NC-ND \u2014 built from four conditions that combine: Attribution (BY, required in all six), ShareAlike (SA), NoDerivatives (ND), and NonCommercial (NC). A separate tool, CC0, lets a rights holder waive copyright entirely and dedicate a work to the public domain. The current version of the licence suite is 4.0, released in November 2013.<\/p>
The variants aren’t interchangeable in a DAM’s rights logic. CC BY is the most permissive of the six and allows commercial use with attribution; CC BY-NC forbids commercial use outright; CC BY-SA and its NC variant require any derivative work to carry the same licence forward, which matters if the asset gets edited and republished. A DAM that only stores “Creative Commons: yes\/no” as a boolean has thrown away the information that actually determines whether an asset is usable for a given project.<\/p>
Version also matters less for practical reuse than the letter combination does, but it’s worth capturing because older 2.0 and 3.0 licences have minor jurisdiction and wording differences from 4.0 that occasionally matter for legal review. The DAM field should store the full designation \u2014 “CC BY-SA 4.0,” not just “CC BY-SA” \u2014 so it’s unambiguous.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of six standardized public licences (CC BY, BY-SA, BY-ND, BY-NC, BY-NC-SA, BY-NC-ND) \u2014 or the CC0 public-domain dedication \u2014 that a rights holder attaches to a work to pre-authorize specific reuse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","faq":[{"question":"How many standard Creative Commons licences are there, and what conditions do they combine?","answer":"Six \u2014 CC BY, BY-SA, BY-ND, BY-NC, BY-NC-SA, and BY-NC-ND \u2014 built from four conditions: Attribution (required in all six), ShareAlike, NoDerivatives, and NonCommercial."},{"question":"What's the difference between a Creative Commons licence and CC0?","answer":"The six CC licences grant conditional reuse rights while retaining copyright; CC0 is a separate tool that waives copyright entirely and dedicates the work to the public domain."},{"question":"Why is it a mistake to tag an asset simply as \"Creative Commons\" in a DAM?","answer":"Because the specific variant determines what's actually allowed \u2014 a BY-NC image forbids commercial use while BY alone permits it. A flat \"Creative Commons\" tag hides that distinction and can let an NC-restricted photo end up in a paid ad."},{"question":"What does the ShareAlike (SA) condition require if an asset is reused?","answer":"Any derivative work built from an SA-licensed asset must be released under the same licence, which matters if the asset gets edited and republished."},{"question":"What version of the Creative Commons licence suite is current, and does it matter?","answer":"Version 4.0, released in November 2013. Version matters less than the letter combination for practical reuse, but older 2.0\/3.0 licences have jurisdiction and wording differences from 4.0 that occasionally matter for legal review."},{"question":"What's the correct way to store a Creative Commons licence in DAM metadata?","answer":"As the full designation \u2014 e.g. \"CC BY-SA 4.0\" \u2014 not just the letter combination or a generic \"Creative Commons\" flag, so the field is unambiguous."}],"checked_date":"2026-08-07","sources":[{"statement":"The six Creative Commons licences combine the Attribution, ShareAlike, NoDerivatives, and NonCommercial conditions; CC0 is a separate public-domain dedication tool.","source_name":"Creative Commons, License Types","url":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/course\/cc-cert-edu\/unit-3-anatomy-of-a-cc-license\/3-3-license-types\/","checked":"2026-08-07"},{"statement":"Creative Commons released version 4.0 of its licence suite in November 2013.","source_name":"Creative Commons Wiki, License Versions","url":"https:\/\/wiki.creativecommons.org\/wiki\/License_Versions","checked":"2026-08-07"}],"kicker":"","fact_checker":0,"reading_time":0,"revisions":[],"seo_title":"","seo_description":"","noindex":false,"related":[2390,2379,2384,2388,2525,2406],"definition":"One of six standardized public licences (CC BY, BY-SA, BY-ND, BY-NC, BY-NC-SA, BY-NC-ND) \u2014 or the CC0 public-domain dedication \u2014 that a rights holder attaches to a work to pre-authorize specific reuse.","why":"A DAM ingesting Creative Commons content has to record which of the six licence variants and which version (the current suite is 4.0, released in 2013) applies per asset, because the difference between BY, NC, and SA is the difference between an image that's safe for a commercial campaign and one that legally isn't. Tagging everything generically as \"Creative Commons\" instead of by variant is how an NC-restricted (non-commercial-only) photo ends up in a paid ad.","example_rows":[{"field":"Licence","values":"CC BY-NC 4.0"},{"field":"Permitted use","values":"Non-commercial only, attribution required"},{"field":"Commercial use","values":"Not permitted without separate licence"}],"mistake":"Storing \"Creative Commons\" as a single flat tag instead of the specific variant, so an editor filters for \"CC-licensed, free to use\" and pulls a BY-NC-SA image into a commercial product without realizing NC forbids that and SA would require the resulting work to be licensed the same way.","deep_link":""},"silo":[24],"class_list":["post-2382","glossary","type-glossary","status-publish","hentry","silo-glossary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/2382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/glossary"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/2382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3502,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/2382\/revisions\/3502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"silo","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/silo?post=2382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}