Benefits to copyright owners when applying CC licenses:
- Convenience
- You can retain attribution and retain control of the portions of your copyright that you value - without needing to field requests for the types of uses that you’d like others to do freely.
- Flexibility & Effectiveness
- CC licenses can be applied to any type of work, have global recognition, and are human & machine readable (see the sidebar on Three Layers of a CC License).
- Support Open Access
- CC licenses are often used where the creator would like their work to be freely available online, as with Open Access scholarship.
Benefits to users of a work under a CC license:
- Clear Message
- The license provides clarity of the intent of the copyright holder, telling the world in advance how the copyright holder would like to see their work used, along with an explicit license for that use.
- Convenience
- So long as your use matches the CC license criteria, (a) you do not have to contact the copyright owner to ask for specific permission and (b) you don’t have to gauge whether your use is within fair use.
- Stability
- CC licenses are irrevocable – you can rely on the CC license so long as the work is protected by copyright, even if the author later redistributes the work under a different license or stops distributing it altogether.
- No license fee
- To find a wide range of material available for free, search on:
- If your planned use would go beyond the terms of the license (and is not Fair Use), you need to ask the copyright holder for permission. It's within the copyright holder's rights to charge a fee when licensing for usage beyond the CC license.
