The nonprofit organization Creative Commons (CC) addresses the legal issues of making content on the internet open so that people can use it as they wish for education, research and other purposes. The organization offers a spectrum of six intellectual property licenses that can be applied to content available on the internet by the person who created it. These licenses range from the most restrictive—people can download a creator’s work and share it with others, but they can’t change it in any way or use it commercially—to the least restrictive: Others can distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as they credit the creator. The latter is called an Attribution or CC BY license. CC’s intellectual property licenses are valid in the US and five other jurisdictions where they’ve been tested in courtrooms.
