Creative commons marks and licenses

You can choose a license (or mark) that works for you at the Creative Commons website. Version 4.0 explicitly considers data licensing. 

There are three Creative Commons marks and licenses that are widely used for open content:

1: Public domain: (CC0)

  • used by copyright holders to waive all rights over a piece of data, including copyright
  • particularly useful in the sharing of data and databases

2: Attribution: (CC BY 4.0)

  • gives users rights to access, use and share (even commercially) your content
  • only restriction is that the user must give credit to the data publisher (rights holder)

3: Attribution & share-alike: (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  • same as the attribution license
  • added restriction that the data user must share back any changes and modifications made to the data

Graphic with creative commons marks