Creative Commons Licences allow creators to give automatic permission to anyone to use their creations. This enables a creators work to reach more people throughout the globe through the fast paced distribution network that is the world wide web. Creative Commons Licences are made up of licence elements which are each associated with a recognisable symbol in order to easily mark content with rules of distribution, decided upon by the creator. The Creative Commons Licence Elements are as follows:

          BY

Attribution – Meaning the user must acknowledge the creator of the content when they publish the work.

          NC

Non-commercial – Meaning none other than the creator can make money from the content.

             ND

NoDerivatives – Meaning the content cannot be modified in any way without the creators permission.

          SA

ShareAlike – Meaning new creations of the original content need to use the same licence as the original content.

Every Creative Commons Licence includes the attribution (BY) element, however the other elements are optional and a Creative Commons Licence is formed through the combination of as few or as many elements as the creator wishes, allowing more or less freedom for others to use their content. Although I somewhat understood the copyright terms of digital media, I was unaware that these licence elements existed and I value learning about them as I can use these licence elements to distribute my own work throughout the internet under clear distribution terms.

(Please note: all images in this post are distributed under permission from the creator – how ironic if they were distributed otherwise)