Licences explained

Introduction

With a Creative Commons licence, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify. The licences share a set of baseline rights, with each licence choice being expressed in three ways:

  • Commons Deed: A plain-language summary of the licence, with relevant icons.
  • Legal Code: The full legal terms.
  • Digital Code: A machine-readable translation of the licence that helps search engines and other applications identify the licensed work by its terms of use.

The Commons Deed makes the licences readily comprehensible. The Legal Code is required to ensure the licences are legally sound. The Digital Code facilitates the distribution and discoverability of the licensed works across the Internet.

If you want to offer your work with no conditions attached, or you want to mark a work that is already free of known copyright restrictions and in the public domain, you can choose one of Creative Commons’ public domain tools. You can read more about these here.

The licences

Here is a description of each of the Creative Commons copyright licences. They are free for anyone to use. You can also download a brochure which explains the New Zealand licences and read more about the Creative Commons licensing approach on the Creative Commons international website.

ATTRIBUTION
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/nz

This licence lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.

ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz

This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially with credit to you (their new works must also be non-commercial).

ATTRIBUTION-SHAREALIKE
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nz

This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-SHAREALIKE
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/nz

This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

ATTRIBUTION-NO DERIVATIVES
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/nz

This licence allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-NO DERIVATIVES
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/nz/

This licence is the most restrictive of our six main licences, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Read about how to choose and apply a Creative Commons copyright licence.