What do those Creative Commons letters actually let you do?
CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC-ND: four letters combine into six licenses. Here is what each one actually allows, in plain English.
You found the perfect photo for a school project, or a worksheet someone else clearly put real work into, and underneath it sits a small string of letters: CC BY-SA, or CC BY-NC-ND, or something in between. Nobody explained those letters in school. They look like a password, and most people either ignore them or assume the worst and walk away. Neither reaction is necessary. Once you know what the letters stand for, you can read them as fast as a traffic light.
Four building blocks, one always present
Every Creative Commons license is built from up to four conditions, and they always appear in the same order. Attribution, written BY, means you must credit the creator the way they ask to be credited. It is in every single Creative Commons license: there is no version without it. ShareAlike, written SA, means that if you adapt the work and share your version, your version has to carry the same license onward, so the openness keeps travelling. NonCommercial, written NC, means the work can be used and adapted for free, but not sold or built into something you charge for. NoDerivatives, written ND, means you can share the work exactly as it is, but you cannot publish a modified version of it.
Those four pieces combine into six possible licenses, from the most open to the most guarded. Reading the letters left to right tells you the whole story before you read a single line of legal text.
- CC BY: credit the creator, then use it however you like, even commercially
- CC BY-SA: credit the creator, and share any adapted version under this same license
- CC BY-NC: credit the creator, adapt freely, but never for a commercial purpose
- CC BY-ND: credit the creator, share it as is, no modified versions allowed
- CC BY-NC-SA: credit the creator, noncommercial use only, adaptations carry the same license
- CC BY-NC-ND: credit the creator, noncommercial use only, no modified versions at all
What this changes for an actual worksheet or photo
Picture three real situations. A teacher finds a diagram under CC BY: they can redraw it, translate the labels, drop it into a handout, and even sell that handout, as long as the original creator is credited somewhere. A parent finds a story template under CC BY-NC-ND: they can print it and hand it out at a free family workshop exactly as published, but they cannot translate it, remix it into something new, or charge for the session. A student building a class wiki finds an article under CC BY-SA, the license Wikipedia itself uses for its text: they can quote it, adapt it, expand it, but the moment they publish their adapted version, that version has to stay under CC BY-SA too, so the next person down the line gets the same freedom.
That last case matters more than it looks. ShareAlike is sometimes called an ’inheritance’ condition: openness passed from one version to the next, generation after generation of reuse, rather than something that quietly disappears the first time someone edits the file.
Crediting properly, without overthinking it
Creative Commons recommends a simple checklist known by the acronym TASL: Title, Author, Source, License. Name the work if it has a title, name the actual person or organization who made it (not ’Creative Commons’: that is the license, not the author), link back to where you found it, and name the license with a link to its text. A workable line looks like this: title of the work, by the author’s name, licensed under CC BY 4.0, with links attached wherever the medium allows it. Put it as close to the material as you reasonably can, a caption under an image, a line at the bottom of a handout, a credits slide at the end of a class presentation.
Credit is not decoration on top of an open license. It is the one payment the license actually asks for.
A few honest pitfalls trip up even careful people acting in good faith. Crediting the platform where you found the image instead of the person who made it. Forgetting that NonCommercial can rule out even a modest workshop fee meant only to cover printing, so check the wording rather than guessing. Assuming a license you cannot identify means anything goes: no visible license usually means the opposite, that ordinary copyright still applies and permission has not been granted.
None of this requires memorizing legal text. Four letters, six combinations, one small credit line: once that pattern is familiar, the string under an image stops looking like a password and starts reading like a plain answer to the only question that matters, which is what you are actually allowed to do with the thing in front of you.
Sources
- Creative Commons Licenses (Creative Commons) (creativecommons.org)
- Wikipedia:Copyrights (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org)