Creative Commons

American  

noun

1. Sometimes creative commons a set of various licenses that allow people to share their copyrighted work to be copied, edited, built upon, etc., while retaining the copyright to the original work (often used attributively): a creative commons license.

   We’re happy for other sites to share these photos under Creative Commons;

   a creative commons license.

2. the nonprofit organization that releases these licenses.

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Etymology

Origin of Creative Commons

First recorded in 2000–05

Example Sentences

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

From Salon • Aug. 26, 2025

Legally, Wikipedia allows users to copy, modify, or publish Wikipedia content if the user attributes the source and shares the result under the same terms of its Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike license.

From Slate • Jan. 19, 2024

It also asserts she lifted an image without crediting the source as required by a Creative Commons license.

From Science Magazine • Jan. 8, 2024

Creative Commons’ Openverse: Creative Commons, the same nonprofit that devised the CC license, has its own open-source search engine that you can use to find free images.

From The Verge • Aug. 22, 2022

This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

From Little Brother by Doctorow, Cory