A practical guide to using CC licenses

The guide Open Content: Navigating Creative Commons Licenses provides people working in science, education, culture and public institutions with information about what open content licenses are and how they can be used to make content freely accessible. The publication by Dr. Till Kreutzer, published by Wikimedia Deutschland and the German UNESCO Commission, is now available in English.

Click here to view the PDF with the option to download (~ 34 mb)

It has been over 10 years since the first edition of the practical guide Open Content was published. Over the years, members of the Open Content community have translated it into various languages, including Indonesian and Finnish. Since then, Open Content has grown immensely in importance in the realms of education, science, culture and the media, to name a few.

Given the increasing technological challenges that permeate our digital world and make it more complex, Open Content licenses are more important than ever; they enable access to knowledge, information and culture while also making it possible to share content in a legally compliant manner.

Using content legally

In its expanded and revised version, the guide explains Creative Commons licenses and clarifies how they’re used. Readers will learn about the legal principles on which they are based and how to choose the right license for their individual needs.

First, Till Kreutzer explains the general principles and objectives of open licensing and gives an overview of the various Creative Commons license modules (for example, CC BY and CC BY-SA). He explains the topics of public domain and CC0 licenses in more detail.

The guide also provides brief overviews of other forms of intellectual property law, such as patents and trademarks, but the publication’s main focus is on the practical use of free licenses and open content.

In addition, the guide offers tips on how to find free content online and ends with a helpful glossary of terms.

Available digitally and in print

The practical guide Open Content: Navigating Creative Commons Licenses by Till Kreutzer is available as an openly licensed and free PDF. You may also request a print version by emailing education@wikimedia.de.

This text was written by Sarah-Isabella Behrens (wikimedia.de) and Georg Fischer (iRights.info) and is published under license CC BY 4.0.