Explanation of the different Creative Commons licenses

If you're a YouTuber who creates online videos for your channel, you may find that finding royalty-free resources for your video, such as free music and sound effects, is a time-consuming task. Creative Common licenses, also called CC licenses, are a type of public copyright license that allows free distribution of copyrighted resources. Creative Common licenses usually have the /"CC/" symbol on the left side of the license tag.

All CC licenses grant some /"basic rights/" that specify what you can achieve. The /"Attribution (BY)/" right means that you can remix or reuse the resource in your work as long as you credit the creator. The usual way of giving credit is to provide some kind of attribution in the video or description by putting some backlinks to the creator's website. Since Creative Commons version 2.0, this right is mandatory and all CC licenses will include this right.

The Share-Alike (SA) right means that you must assign the same license to your video that the media creator assigned to their work. Without this right, you can offer different licenses for your work from the source. For example, you use some music resources that are under the CC BY license. You want to share your remixed version, but you don't want your work to be used by others for commercial projects. So, if the original resource has a Share-Alike right, you can add the Non-Commercial condition to your work to change the license to CC BY-NC.

The Non-Commercial right is the same as the CC BY right, except that it is not allowed to be used for commercial purposes. If you plan to use music to create videos and post them on a YouTube channel to earn some money, you are not allowed to use the resources under CC NC licenses.

The No Derivatives (ND) right means that you can only share the resource in its original form. You cannot remix it or incorporate it into your video. Similar to the Non-Commercial right, you can use resources under the CC ND licenses if you plan to monetize your video.

The combination of these rights results in different types of Creative Commons licenses. The upper one is the most open license and the lower one is the strictest. The most open is the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which is the same as the public domain license. It gives you the highest level of freedom in using these resources for your work. The strictest in this list is the CC BY-NC-ND license. You must give credit to the author to use the resource in non-commercial projects, and no remixes or modifications can be made to it.

Attribution:
Image from Pixabay:
https://pixabay.com/zh/vectors/creative-commons-cc-character-785334/
https://pixabay.com/zh/vectors/creative-commons-licenses-icons-by-783531/

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