Strengths and Weaknesses of Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons copyright licenses are a popular way to license work that you want to make open access. CC licenses are a standardized way for people to grant certain copyright permissions to their creative work. Each license allows creators to retain copyright while allowing certain uses of their work. Choosing a license isn’t always easy and each one has its own strengths and weakness. Let’s look at a few of the CC licenses and consider the implications of each.

I Photoshopped this photo of a dog onto a photo of a Payday loan store.
Payday Loan Place Window Graphics by Taber Andrew Bain and dog photo
by David Locke. David may not like that his dog is now
associated with pay day loans, but because Taber and David
licensed their photos CC-BY, I'm allowed to remix them.

CC-BY Attribution License

CC-BY is the most liberal of 
all the licenses, other than placing a work directly in the public domain. It allows anyone to distribute, remix, and build upon your work as long they attribute the original to you. The strengths of a CC-BY license are that it allows for the greatest dissemination of the work and is easy for users to implement because they simply have to give the original creator credit. One weakness is that the creator has less control over how their work is used. For example, a creative work might be incorporated into another work in a way that the original creator doesn't like. Another scenario is that a company might sell work that is licensed CC-BY for profit, which depending on the circumstance can be a strength or a weakness. On the one hand, the work will be distributed more widely and the creator is credited. On the other hand, the original creator won't be paid for the work they've done.

CC-BY-NC Attribution-NonCommercial 

If you are someone that is concerned about another person profiting off your open access work, then CC-BY-NC is for you. This license lets others remix, reuse, and build on a work as long as they acknowledge the creator and use it for non-commercial purposes. The strengths of CC-BY-NC are similar to CC-BY. It still allows for great dissemination and is easy for non-commercial users to implement. The weaknesses of this license are fairly nuanced. One potential weakness is that it regulates the use not the user of the work. That means that a for-profit company can use something that is licensed creative commons as long as they're not using it for commercial purposes. For example, if someone writes a textbook on project management and licenses it CC-BY-NC, a for-profit corporation might incorporate that work in their internal professional development material and wouldn't be in violation of the license. The reverse is true as well, a non-profit company would be violating the license if they sell a work licensed CC-BY-NC for a profit. One might consider this a weakness because it brings in a lot of gray area and it's not always obvious if someone is in violation of the license.

CC-BY-SA Attribution-ShareAlike

Another concern that authors often have is that someone will reuse or remix their work and then put a more restrictive license on it and thus restrict dissemination. That's where the CC-BY-SA license comes in handy. CC-BY-SA lets others remix, reuse, and build upon a work, even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit the creator and license the new work under identical terms. Its strength is that it allows the original creator to control the openness of future derivatives and allows for wide distribution. The weakness of the license is that it is only compatible with other works that are in the public domain, or licensed CC-BY and CC-BY-SA. This means it can be difficult for people to implement those terms, especially if they're trying to gather a number of materials with a variety of licenses.

Resources

This post explores three of the six standard CC licenses often used in open access publishing. I've tried to summarize some of what I believe are strengths and weaknesses of those licenses based on my experiences of working with authors to decide what's best for their creative work, but you should explore the licenses for yourself and decide! For more information on each license and useful tools that will walk you through choosing a license, visit creativecommons.org.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License