Applying Creative Commons Licenses to Your Work: Module 3: Choosing and Applying a License

You've decided you're going to apply a CC license to your work? Hooray!

But how do you decide which license to apply? Follow these steps, and use the information in this module, to help you make that determination:

1. First, consider what type of work you want to license. Is the work your original creation? Is it an adaptation of one or more other works? Or a collection of unaltered works? The licenses that are compatible with your work may depend on your answers to these questions.
2. If the work is an adaptation or collection, consider how the component works are licensed. This may impact which licenses are available for your use.
3. Finally, consider how you want others to be able to reuse the work.

Licensing Your Original Work

If you are licensing your own original work, you can skip #2 above and move on to considering how you want others to be able to reuse your work. Return to Module 2 to review the permissions allowed by each type of license and the points to consider before choosing a license.

Then visit the CC Chooser to either select a license or walk through a series of steps for help selecting the appropriate license for your work.

The CC Chooser will 1) recommend a license, and 2) create plain text, rich text, and HTML versions of the license information for you to mark your work.

Licensing an Adaptation/Remix

An adaptation (which may also be known as a derivative work or a remix) is a new work that is based on one or more existing copyrighted works, and that contains sufficient creative components beyond the original to warrant copyright protection for the new components. Adaptations include translations of a work into a new language, the synching of music to a movie, and the creation of a film based on a book.

It is important to note that there are changes you can make to a work that do NOT result in an adaptation, such as making minor spelling and punctuation changes, using excerpts from a work to illustrate a point, and changing format (for example, making a print copy of a digital work). In these cases, you do not need to consider attaching a new license to your modified version of the work.

Visit the Adaptations page for information on what kinds of CC-licensed works you can include in your adaptation, and what kind of license you can apply to the new work.

Licensing a Collection

A collection is a work comprised of separate creative works to make a whole. Each of the individual pieces in the collection is its own distinct work. Only the new creative aspects of the collection are copyrightable (arrangement or annotation of the works, for example). Examples of collections include a book of essays on a single topic, a book of essays by an individual author, a collection of poems, and an encyclopedia.

Visit the Collections page for information on collections and how they may be licensed.

This section is a derivative of "Sharing Your Work with Creative Commons Licenses Part II: Collections and Adaptations" by Jill Hallam-Miller (2020), licensed CC BY 4.0 and adapted from the September 2019 Creative Commons Certificate Course by Creative Commons, licensed CC BY 4.0. The adapted content is from the Creative Commons Certificate Course Unit 4: Using CC Licenses and CC Licensed Works.

Return to Module 2: Licensing Considerations

Go to Module 3 Subsection: Licensing an Adaptation/Remix

Go to Module 3 Subsection: Licensing a Collection

Go to Module 4: Creating a CC-Licensed Work