1. CREATIVE COMMONS FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE
Welcome to group.
You are here today because you are interested in, or have been encouraged to understand more about why copyright is important in making sure you can best manage and share your collections online.
This presentation is an introduction in Creative Commons licenses and how you can use these licenses as a cultural heritage professional. When publishing cultural heritage online, and ingesting it to Europeana, you will be asked to provide a rights statements relating to the copyright status of the digital object. This includes a number of Creative Commons license options. Please remember that the material featured within this presentation is based on ‘best practice’ and does not replace legal advice. We suggest that you check your national legislation before applying rights statements. If you have any questions during the presentation, please write them down so you can ask your aggregator during a training session or send them via to
CREATIVE COMMONS FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE

2. Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons (CC) Licenses give universal permission for certain types of use of a copyright protected work.
CC licenses can only be applied by the rights holder of the work, or with explicit permission from the rights holder.
CC licenses cannot be revoked.
Creative Commons provides licenses and legal tools that authors can use to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they grant to others.
Once something is made available online using a Creative Commons licence it means that the terms of the licence last forever. This means that people can access and reuse the copyright protected works without having to ask for any further permission, when the terms of the license are met.
Creative Commons does not replace copyright, but works on top of it it to enable authors to modify their copyright terms to best manage the re-use of their works.
The Creative Commons licenses are valid across the globe which makes them easily understood at an international level.
The licenses can only be applied by the rightsholder of the work, or with explicit permission from the rightsholder. Furthermore, they can only be applied if a work is copyright protected, and not for works that are already in the public domain.
Creative Commons for Cultural Heritage
CC BY-SA

3. Creative Commons: three layers
CC licenses are built up of three layers:
the deed (human readable summary).
the legal code (complete license in a legal language).
the data (the machine-readable layer for search engines).
Creative Commons licenses are comprised of three layers.
The first layer is the human readable summary, also called the deed. The deeds are simple summaries of the license conditions targeted at regular internet users.
The second layer is the legal code itself. This is the complete license in legal language, something most people will not read but has all the nitty gritty details.
The third and final layer is the data which is machine-readable for search engines, so they can easily identify Creative Commons licensed work.
Creative Commons for Cultural Heritage
CC BY-SA

4. Creative Commons: some rights reserved
Full copyright:
all rights reserved
Creative Commons Licenses:
some rights reserved
Public Domain:
no rights reserved
Creative Commons licenses live on the spectrum between full copyright and the public domain. They consist of four elements which can be combined to six combinations.
Creative Commons for Cultural Heritage
CC BY-SA

5. Table of contents
There are 4 main elements of the Creative Commons licenses which can be combined to form 6 different licenses (BY, BY-SA, BY-NC, BY-ND, BY-NC-SA, BY-NC-ND):
The four main elements of the Creative Commons licenses are:
The BY attribution element, which means that you have to give attribution to the author and link to the license.
The ShareAlike element, which means that derivated works need to be made available under the same license
The NonCommercial element, which means that reuse is only permitted for non-commercial purposes, and
The No Derivatives element, which means that the work must not be modified. BY
Attribution
Give attribution to the author and link to license SA
ShareAlike
Derivative works need to be made available under same license NC
NonCommercial
Re-use is only permitted for non-commercial purposes ND
NoDerivatives
The work must not be modified
Creative Commons for Cultural Heritage
CC BY-SA

6. Public Domain Legal Tools
The Public Domain Mark is applied when there is no copyright in the material. It is meant as a signal to the end-user that they can reuse this material. It can be applied by anyone.
The CC0 Public Domain Dedication is applied when there are copyrights or other rights in the material. The rights holder waives all possible rights in the object and declares it to be in the public domain. It can only be applied by the rights holder.
The two other legal tools Creative Commons offers are the Public Domain Mark and the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.
The Public Domain Mark is applied when there is no copyright in the material or copyright has expired. It is a legal tool and can be applied by anyone who believes the object is in the public domain. It is meant as a signal to the end-user that they can reuse the material.
The CC0 Public Domain Dedication is applied when you want to waive any possible copyrights or other rights in the material. It can only be applied by the rightsholder. By using this tool, you declare the material to be in the public domain and encourage the widest access to the work as possible.
Creative Commons for Cultural Heritage
CC BY-SA

7. Creative Commons: a spectrum of rights
open
restrictive }
freely reusable
(encouraged by Europeana)
The Creative Commons elements can be combined to six different licenses as you can see on the slide.The two legal tools - the public domain mark and the CC0 public domain dedication - stand on top as they are they signal the most re-use possible.
Europeana encourages data providers, when they have the permission, to use one of the top 4 tools Creative Commons offers. The use of these tools enable end-users to re-use and build upon our shared cultural heritage.
They fall under the definition of ‘freely reusable’ and are required for the fourth and top tier of the Europeana Publishing Framework.
Creative Commons for Cultural Heritage
CC BY-SA

8. Use of CC licenses on Europeana
Creative Commons licenses (including CC0) can only be applied by (or with permission of) the rights holder. Data providers cannot apply a CC license to digital objects for which they do not own the rights!
Creative Commons licenses cannot be applied to Digital Objects that are in the Public Domain. They require an underlying copyright to be present.
Europeana encourages data providers to use one of the two most open CC licenses (CC BY or CC BY-SA) to enable the greatest discoverability and reuse of cultural heritage.
Creative Commons licenses are great legally-sound and globally understood tool for publishing cultural heritage online, and ingesting it to Europeana.
Before applying the licenses, remember that Creative Commons licenses can only be applied by the rightsholder and not by the institution (unless the institution is the rightsholder).
Also, Creative Commons licenses cannot be applied to digital objects that are in the public domain. You can only apply a licence to something that is in-copyright, and works that are in the public domain by definition have no copyright. In the case of public domain materials in your collections, you can apply the Public Domain Mark.
Creative Commons for Cultural Heritage
CC BY-SA

9. Thank you for listening
Thank you for listening. This presentation is the second out of three presentations that provide an overview of:
The key principles of European copyright law and related rights, why it is important to be legally compliant when sharing cultural content online,
Why it is important to understand the law in the context of working with Europeana,
And how to correctly label digital objects and metadata using the Europeana Licensing Framework and other standards of best practices such as Creative Commons.
If you have any questions or feedback about the content of this presentation, please ask your aggregator or send an to