Original image

The image is very similar to the first one. In the upper position, it is the restrictive copyright. Then, they came the most known Creative Commons licenses:

• CC BY-NC-ND. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivs license.
• CC BY-NC-SA. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
• CC BY-NC. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.
• CC BY-ND. Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivs license.
• CC BY-SA. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This is the only Creative Commons license that can be called copyleft type.
• CC BY. Creative Commons Attribution license.

Public domain

And in the bottom part, it is the CC0 dedication (Creative Commons Zero). It isn’t a license, but a dedication. There is legal differente between both, but if you aren’t an advocate it isn’t something interesting. Anyway, the Creative Commons Zero aim is to let a work in the public domain.

It’s important to clarify that public domain doesn’t mean exactly the same everywhere. In general it does, because everyone can take the work and publish it, distribute it, change it, etc., without asking for permission to anybody. But they are some differences. For example in USA, an author can put his work directly in the public domain, while in the European Union, there are “moral rights” wich are inalienable (in Spain for example an author has a right to ask for the integrity of his work). To avoid this differences, Creative Commons created CC0 dedication, wich stablish that the author renounces all his/her rights over the work, but with a note: to the extend allowable by law.

The PD option included in the previous traffic light has been removed, because it was applicable only in USA and because Creative Commons itself decided to retire it in 2010.

Color classification

I’ll finish explaining the color classification I have used. The conventional copyright license wich all us know, is very restrictive and lets do very few things with the work. That’s way I put it in the red side of the traffic light. In the yellow side, I put some of the CC licenses. These licenses aren’t so restrictive, as they let copy, modify or publish the works in some situations or under certain conditions.

But to take the works as free (like in “freedom of speech”), they can’t have too many limitations. That’s way BY-SA, BY and CC0 are in the green side of the traffic light. The frontier I use to classify a work as free or not, it’s not my invention. It’s based on the agree of people from many areas. Seen the compatibility between free software definition, free cultural work definition and open knowledge definition, it’s hardly surprising that Creative Commons itself marked some of the options it offers as appropriate for free cultural works. Those wich have the seal “APROBED FOR Free Cultural Works”, are precisely the ones that are in the green side of the traffic light.

The source file of the new image:

creativecommons-semaforoa-2.svg

Note: Thanks to Unai, from today on, the Creative Commons article of the Wikipedia in basque, shows the new version of the traffic light.

Other languages: euskara, castellano

Creative Commons has published a new license/certificate called CC0. More than one will ask himself why they publish another license if they are already a lot. The key is that this new certificate fills an important hole in the wordwide legislation that recognizes (and protects) the public domain, but don’t give to the author the option to release their works directly in the public domain. For that, an amount of years stablished by each legislation must be gone by and finally the works arrive to the public domain.

USA’s legislation allows the authors to release their works directly in the public domain and that’s why Creative Commons created the CC PD certificate. But in Europe (including France and Spain), this option is not in the provision of the legislations, so the authors can’t free their works. 70 years since the death of the author must be hold on.

Faced with this situation, I have decided to replace the generic public domain notice in the footer of this web site to the next new one: “All the contents of this website, unless it is indicated other thing, are given to the public domain to the extend allowable by law.”

The link references the Creative Commons’ CC0 certificate (it isn’t a license, but a certificate as the public domain legal notice):

As you can see, this text says: “The person who associated a work with this document has dedicated the work to the Commons by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law and all related or neighboring legal rights he or she had in the work, to the extent allowable by law.”

This means that the author relinquish all the rights over the work, and if the law doesn’t allow to give up all them, the author relinquish all the rights allowed by the law.

To finish this article, here it is updated the image that shows all the options that Creative Commons offers, whether they are free (green) or not, whether they are copyleft or not, etc.:

If someone wants to obtain the images showed into this article in the original SVG format, take them from here:

creativecommons-semaforoa.tar.gz (93 KB)

More information:

• About CC0
• CC0
• CC0 legal code
• CC0 FAQ
• Public domain

Other languages: euskara, castellano