Creative Commons provides a range of licenses, each of which grants different rights to use the materials licensed under them. All of these licenses offer more permissions than “all rights reserved.”
To help show more clearly what the different CC licenses let people do, CC marks the most permissive of its licenses as “Approved for Free Cultural Works.” When you apply these licenses to material you create, it meetsthe Freedom Defined definitionof a “Free Cultural Work.” Free cultural works are the ones that can be most readily used, shared, and remixed by others, and go furthest toward creating a commons of freely reusable materials.
What does “Approved for Free Cultural Works” mean?
CC uses the definition of free cultural works at Freedom Defined to categorize the CC licenses. (Freedom Defined is an open organization of free culture advocates and researchers; the definition was developed by its community as a parallel to efforts such as theFree Software Definition, to have a standard for defining Free Culture.) Using that definition, material licensed underCC BYorBY-SAis a free cultural work. (So is anything in the worldwide public domain marked withCC0or thePublic Domain Mark.) CC’s other licenses–BY-NC,BY-ND,BY-NC-SA, andBY-NC-ND–only allow more limited uses, and material under these licenses is not considered a free cultural work.
The following graphics appear in ourlicense chooserto distinguish these two categories of licenses:
This graphic means that a license is “approved for free cultural works” under this definition. (These licenses are sometimes referred to as “free licenses.”)
This graphic means that a license is not approved for free cultural works.
什么是自由文化作品?
Freedom Defined namesfour necessary characteristics of a free cultural work:
- Freedom to use the work itself.This is the most basic thing a free content license allows: when you get a copy of a work under one of these licenses, you can use it however you want. This means without restrictions based on the kind of use: you may use it for commercial, political, or religious purposes, for example, or make unlimited copies in different formats to use on different devices. (This is why the NC licenses aren’t considered licenses for Free Cultural Works.)
- 为任何目的使用作品中的信息的自由。In addition to being able to simply share a free cultural work, you should also be able to use the information it contains. For example, if it’s a research paper or educational course, you should be able to build on it for your own research and teaching. If you are using something functional, such as a hardware design, you should be able to reverse-engineer it to figure out exactly how it works.
- Freedom to share copies of the work for any purpose.When you get a copy of a free cultural work, you can make and share as many copies as you want, wherever you want. This means you can put it on your blog or website, include it in books, share it on file-trading networks, sell it in stores, give it away on CDs–there is no limit on how many copies you can make or where you can copy them, and you can use them for any purpose, even commercially.
- Freedom to make and share remixes and other derivatives for any purpose.您可以在自由文化许可下编辑、混音和转换作品，并像共享原件一样自由地共享这些混音副本。例如，您可以在原作的基础上进行翻译、混搭、同人小说和任何其他您想要的派生作品，并自由地分享这些混音作品，甚至出售它们。(This is why ND-licensed work isn’t considered a Free Cultural Work.)
为什么知识共享会区卡塔尔vs葡萄牙分析分“免费”和“非免费”许可?难道它们不都比“版权所有”要好吗?
它们比“版权所有”要好，这就是知识共享支持它们的原因;卡塔尔vs葡萄牙分析我们希望鼓励特许商在可能和适当的情况下选择其中一种许可证。但是知识卡塔尔vs葡萄牙分析共享的存在不仅仅是为了创造版权许可，也是为了鼓励通过分享知识来建立一个繁荣的共享。我们认为，在许多情况下，这是通过使用一种免费许可证来完成的，它对重用的限制最小。
Does the term “cultural works” mean only art, or does it also include things like educational text and databases?
“Cultural works” is simply the term chosen by Freedom Defined to distinguish non-software works that should be under a free content license rather than a free software license. (Free software licenses often include terms designed specifically for functional works that free content licenses don’t contain, such as source code requirements and patent grants.)
Any copyrightable work or database that is not software should be considered to be a “cultural work”. (Educational and factual work is, after all, very much a part of culture!)
Why does CC support “non-free” licenses at all? Isn’t that against its mission?
CC希望推广一种比“版权所有”更开放的文化。一些创作者想让他们的作品得到更广泛的使用。有些人希望允许某些用途，但限制其他用途。我们相信，作为“所有权利保留”的替代方案，所有级别的开放都值得鼓励和支持。虽然我们希望一些创作者将使用非免费许可作为未来更开放的踏脚石，但CC鼓励以任何许可下的共享作为创建更开放文化的一种方式。
Why isn’t a license that restricts commercial use considered a free culture license?
NC条件意味着许可禁止某些类型的使用，限制了可以从作品中进行何种类型的重复使用。由于自由定义的要求之一是自由文化作品不得限制任何特定类型的使用，甚至是商业使用，因此NC许可不被视为自由文化许可。Freedom Defined has alonger explanationof the arguments against using NC licenses.
Why isn’t a license that restricts derivative works considered a free culture license?
ND许可证阻止其他人重新混合和构建您的作品。这违反了自由定义的第四个要求。
Why is the Share-Alike license a free culture license?
ShareAlike doesn’t place any restrictions on the type of use–its only difference from the BY license is that it requires works that build upon it to be released freely. (Usually, under the same license, but there may be other compatible licenses in the future.)
This is different from the NC and ND licenses, which restrict some types of uses entirely, regardless of whether those users would contribute their work back to the commons.
What about other definitions?
Freedom Defined maintains the main definition CC uses to determine which licenses are suitable for free cultural works. However, there are several other definitions that you may also be interested in.
- TheOpen Knowledge Foundation(OKFN) maintains theOpen Definition. Itslist of conformant licensesincludes CC0, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA.
- TheFree Software Foundationmaintains adefinition of Free Softwareand a list ofacceptable licenses.
- David Wiley maintains theOpen Content definition.
- Debian maintains a list ofguidelines for free software licensing在他们的项目。
(Do you know of a widely used definition we’ve left out? Please let us know!)
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