All Glossary

Creative Commons Attribution

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that created a set of free, standardized copyright licenses. These licenses let creators say, in advance, how other people may use their work. In plain language, instead of saying “All rights reserved, ask me before using anything,” a Creative Commons license says something like “You may use this, but you must follow these conditions”. Creative Commons license names are combinations of codes:

CC - Creative Commons - for articles, photos, diagrams, videos, manuals, website pages, educational text, documentation, artwork, etc.
BY Give attribution/credit
NC NonCommercial use only
SA ShareAlike: adaptations must use the same or compatible license
ND NoDerivatives: do not share modified versions

ODC - Open Data Commons is mainly for databases and datasets: structured data, catalogues, recipe databases, material-property tables, map data, research datasets, etc. Its licenses have discrete names.

My choices are:

CC BY: Lets others copy, share, remix, adapt, and build on the work, including commercially, as long as they give proper credit to the creator, link to the license, and say whether changes were made.

ODC-BY: Lets people share, modify, and use a database, subject mainly to attribution requirements.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 permits people, schools, potters, and non-commercial mirror sites to share, translate, and adapt the work, while requiring attribution and requiring their adapted versions to remain non-commercial under the same terms.

I am leaning toward CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 for both data its representation on web pages. However, the catch is that if I forbid commercial use, many open-data people will no longer call it “open data” in the strict sense, because the Open Definition expects reuse without commercial restrictions.

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