The Role of Licenses in Knowledge Transfer

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Creative Commons (CC) is a set of licensing agreements designed specifically to allow potential users of protected content to quickly check and obtain information regarding the conditions under which a protected work is available for use.

From the author’s perspective, CC licences are standardised agreements that allow authors to clearly define how their works of authorship may be used in a digital environment.

They do not replace traditional copyright, but rather complement it. This means that authors retain their rights while simultaneously granting certain freedoms of use to others, thereby facilitating and accelerating the use of digital works.

There are six types of CC licences in total, each named according to its key elements that define the rights and obligations of users. All of them share a common element: Attribution (BY), which means it is always mandatory to credit the author of the work. CC licence modules allow for the distribution, modification, and adaptation of the work while naming the original author (BY) in several forms – further sharing as a non-commercial work (NC), sharing without adaptation (ND), sharing under the same conditions as the original work (SA), or under other conditions.

More specifically, the differences between licences arise from combinations of the following three elements:

• NoDerivatives (ND) – modifications or adaptations of the work are not permitted
• NonCommercial (NC) – the work may be used only for non-commercial purposes
• ShareAlike (SA) – if the work is adapted, the new version must be licensed under the same terms as the original.