If you’ve ever read Wikipedia or watched a TED Talk video, you’ve benefited from media that was shared under a Creative Commons license. You can find amazing content—images, 3D models, video, software, news, stories, databases, even whole academic courses—all available free. Creative Commons—CC for short—offers a very simple way for creators to grant blanket advance permission for others to use their creative work, all while setting conditions and affirming their intellectual property rights. By applying a certain type of Creative Commons license, creators can decide whether to permit others to use this material in commercial work, or limit its use to noncommercial contexts. They can decide to let others alter it—crop an illustration, remix music, apply effects to or change the colors of a photo—or prohibit reuse that transforms the original.
