Special:Badtitle/NS102:License short name

From Creative Commons
Revision as of 18:05, 2 September 2010 by Akozak (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

Different organizations license their resources in different ways. Licenses, in general, tell you how you can use the material. Some licenses are more restrictive than others.

What is a License short name?

A license short name is the license, minus the version and all the legal stuff. Here, we've listed the different licenses in their short name form for easy viewing and searching.

What is copyright?

Copyright is simply a blanket term for any work that is not in the public domain. Public domain is "no rights reserved"; copyright is some or all rights reserved, depending on the type of copyright.

OK, but then what do you mean by "copyright" as opposed to the other license short names?

By copyright, we usually mean "all rights reserved" or fully restricted copyright--for example, here is a description of copyright policies under United States' law: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html. In the United States, this type of copyright only allows fair use, which allows certain uses of the work for certain purposes (i.e. non-commercial or educational). Many other countries also have certain copyright exceptions and limitations enshrined in law. In some cases, copyrighted materials are marked as being "all rights reserved" with certain allowances beyond fair use--these exceptions are specifically tailored for that material in extra clauses, usually in the site's legal notices. For simplicity's sake, we still regard these as falling under "copyright" because these types of sui generis licenses do not lend themselves to standardization and therefore require the same careful consideration about the rights granted as typical "all rights reserved" copyright.

Additionally, we may have lumped certain other licenses (maybe even some claiming to be open) under this "copyright" type due to their rare or outdated occurrence. Most of these licenses are incompatible with each other; therefore, we consider them as another type of restrictive copyright. Finally, if there is no copyright statement at all, we must assume that the materials are "all rights reserved" since copyright is endowed automatically (in the United States) upon creation.

What is PD?

PD stands for the public domain. As mentioned above, any work in the public domain is "no rights reserved". For more details, see our public domain page.

What do the different CC licenses stand for?

The different CC licenses grant various freedoms that go beyond copyright. The full list of CC licenses and their terms can be found here: http://creativecommons.org/about/license/. Keep in mind that the license short name (CC BY) is not the full license; for example, there are different versions (2.5, 3.0 unported) of each license. The "License" field contains a url that directs you to a page with the exact license specification and terms.

What are the different GNU licenses?

Explanations of the different GNU licenses and their terms can be found here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html. GNU licenses also have different versions, which are specified in the "License" field.

What do you mean--that there are "various" license short names?

Generally, we try to reserve this term for large repositories where it is difficult to name all the license short names without going through every single resource. For instance, we know that a site's license provider is CC, but that its resources are licensed under various versions of different CC licenses. In this case, the License provider is "CC" and the License short name is "various".

On the other hand, if we know that a site only offers CC BY and CC BY-SA licensed work, then we would not mark it "various" but "CC BY" and "CC BY-SA." (If you know the specific license short names, you can check more than one when entering the organization/site.)


This is a property of type String.

The allowed values for this property are:

Retrieved from "https://wiki.creativecommons.org/index.php?title=Special:Badtitle/NS102:License_short_name&oldid=40968"