Commons licences, explained
Share your work and still keep it yours. What a licence actually does, what "share-alike" means in plain English, and how to pick one in five minutes.
If you make something — a guide, a template, a poster, a piece of software, a photograph — the law gives you control over copying it. A licence is how you hand some of that control to other people, on your terms, without giving up ownership. That is the whole idea. Everything below is a variation on it.
Start with the one distinction that matters. An assignment transfers ownership of your copyright to someone else — you no longer hold it. A licence is permission: you keep ownership and give other people defined rights on defined conditions. If you want to share your work and still be able to use it yourself, you want a licence, not an assignment.
1. A licence is not a handover
- You keep the copyright. The work is still yours. You can license it to other people on different terms, or stop offering it, subject to the licences you have already granted.
- You grant specific permissions. A licence says what others may do — copy, change, sell, share — and on what conditions, such as crediting you.
- Licences are not always revocable. If you grant someone a licence and they meet its conditions, they generally keep those rights for that copy. Do not treat a licence as a temporary favour you can switch off.
- You can only license what you own. If several people wrote the thing, or you used someone else's photos or music in it, all the owners have to agree — and the material you did not create needs its own permission. Put that agreement in writing before you publish.
2. Why "all rights reserved" fights a co-op's values
By default, everything you make is fully restricted: nobody may copy, adapt or reuse it without asking. "All rights reserved" is just that default, written down on purpose.
That is a bad fit for anything built by a group, for three practical reasons:
- Your own members cannot reuse it. A tool built by a co-op, locked to all rights reserved, cannot be handed to the next co-op without a separate written permission — which means it will not spread, and the whole point of building it was to spread it.
- Nobody can improve it. The next group solves the same problem from scratch, badly. Work that could compound does not.
- It contradicts the reason people contributed. Volunteers and members usually contribute because the result will be shared. Discover later that it is locked up, and they stop contributing.
None of this means giving everything away with no conditions. It means choosing the conditions deliberately instead of accepting the default.
3. The three practical positions
Most commons licences fall into three broad families. The names below are the well-known Creative Commons ones, which is where most non-software sharing happens.
| Position | What it means in plain English | Known as |
|---|---|---|
| Permissive | Anyone may use, change and share it, including commercially, as long as they credit you. | CC BY |
| Copyleft (share-alike) | Anyone may use and change it, but anything built from it must be shared under the same licence. Improvements stay open. | CC BY-SA |
| Public domain dedication | You give up your rights as far as the law allows, with no conditions at all. Anyone may do anything with it. | CC0 |
How to think about the choice. Permissive gets your work used as widely as possible, including by people who will not share anything back. Copyleft gets it used slightly less widely, and keeps the improvements in the commons. Public domain dedication is the most generous and the least controlled — appropriate for reference material, raw data and simple facts.
4. What "share-alike" means
Share-alike is the condition that makes a licence copyleft. In one sentence:
You may build on this and share what you built — but you must release your version under the same licence. So nobody can take the commons version, improve it, and lock the improvement away.
Three things people get wrong about it:
- It binds the adapted work, not the whole of your project. If you include a share-alike image in a bigger document, exactly how far the condition reaches is a genuine question of legal detail — check the licence text and get advice rather than assuming. If that could be a problem, use a permissive licence instead.
- It does not stop anyone selling. Commercial use is still allowed under share-alike; the condition is about the licence on the result, not about who may make money.
- It does not stop people criticising or quoting you. It is a copyright licence, not a gag.
5. How attribution works
Almost every commons licence requires you to credit the creator. In practice that means giving the reader four things:
- Who made it — the name or organisation the creator wants used.
- What licence it is under — for example, CC BY-SA.
- Where to find the licence — a link to it, or the address of the licence text.
- Whether you changed it — a short note if you adapted or remixed it.
That is the usual practice. The exact requirements, and how you must display them, depend on the individual licence — read the licence text itself rather than relying on this summary. The good news is that attribution costs nothing and makes people more willing to let you use their work again.
6. Choosing one in five minutes
- Do you want anyone to be able to make money from it, without asking? If yes, that rules out restricting commercial use. Go to question 3.
- Do you want to stop people selling your work? That needs a licence that restricts commercial use. Creative Commons publishes such variants, but we have not checked those here — read the licence text itself before you use one, because the restriction shapes who can use your work and it is easy to get wrong.
- Do you want improvements to stay open? If yes, choose a copyleft / share-alike licence such as CC BY-SA.
- Do you just want maximum use, with credit? Choose a permissive licence such as CC BY.
- Do you not care who does what with it? Dedicate it to the public domain with CC0.
Two situations where the answer is different:
- Software. There are licences written specifically for code, and they split along the same permissive-versus-copyleft line, but the names and the details differ. Do not translate a content licence onto code without checking — pick a licence intended for software.
- Mixed material. A workbook containing your text, someone else's photos and a piece of software is three licensing problems, not one. List every component, find out its licence, and only then decide what yours can say.
7. Check this before you rely on anything here
This page is an explanation, not a legal document, and it is not legal advice. Unlike the templates on this site, it is not built from a set of cited sources — it is a plain-English description of how licensing works in general. The names used here (Creative Commons, CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC0) are the well-known ones — the canonical texts are CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC0 1.0, and those are the versions to read — but licence terms, versions and names change, and there are other licences we have deliberately not described because we could not verify them.
Before you apply a licence to anything: read the licence text itself, in the version you intend to use. If money, other people's work, or a member-owned body is involved, get a solicitor to check the position once. A wrong licence notice is harder to undo than to get right the first time.
8. The practical version
- Decide, as a group, that the work is being shared. Write down who owns it and that you all agree to the licence. Do this before you publish, not after.
- Pick one licence and state it in the right place — on the cover, in the footer, in the file header. One licence, stated clearly, beats a hopeful paragraph about "please feel free to use this".
- Read the licence text before you rely on it. Ours included.
- Credit other people the way you want to be credited. And keep the credits intact when you pass their work on.
Not legal advice. This page is a plain-English explanation rather than a cited source document, and it deliberately names only the licences we are confident about. Licence terms and versions change, and there are other licences we have not described. Read the licence text you intend to use, in the version you intend to use, before you apply it to anything.
Free to copy, adapt and pass on.