What are Creative Commons Licenses?

A Cutting for Business reader recently emailed me asking about Creative Commons Licenses in craft businesses. I haven’t talked about them on Cutting for Business before, although, I’ve talked extensively about cut file and font licensing in this post. Let’s take a look at Creative Commons today.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a worldwide, non-profit organization based in California. Their mission is to promote sharing of knowledge and works with easy to understand, worldwide, standardized licenses assigned by the creator. Through Creative Commons, creators (they call them licensors) are able to share research, art, design, music, photography, and more with other people.

What Licenses are Available Under Creative Commons?

Creative Commons offers six different licenses types:

Commercial Use:

• Attribution CC BY
• Attribution ShareAlike CC BY-SA
• Attribution-NoDerivs CC BY-ND

Non Commercial Use:

• Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC
• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA
• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND

So, what do these all mean? Creative Commons offers a great run down of their license types along with examples at this link.

Do you want to license something using a Creative Commons license? Start at this link.

What Can Craft Businesses do with Creative Commons Material?

Now, the important part for craft business owners. What can you do with a Creative Commons material? As long as the license allows, you can use Creative Commons licensed images for your website, for social media marketing materials, to make crafts to sell with, and more. You could use Creative Commons licensed music in a YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram video, or Creative Commons licensed software to build an app. The options are endless and there are more than 1.4 billion intellectual properties licensed through Creative Commons.

Search for Creative Commons materials here.

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