Creative Commons license

[13] The CCL emerged as a reaction to the decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled constitutional provisions of the Copyright Term Extension Act that extended the copyright term of works to be the last living author's lifespan plus an additional 70 years.

To address this issue, Creative Commons asked its affiliates to translate the various licenses to reflect local laws in a process called "porting".

[17] This allows Creative Commons licenses to be applied to all work falling under copyright, including: books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, and websites.

[29] Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses and five are not.

Of the eleven valid combinations, the five that lack the "BY" clause have been retired because 98% of licensors requested attribution, though they do remain available for reference on the website.

[43] However, controversy arose over its clause which excluded from the scope of the license any relevant patents held by the copyright holder.

[40][44] From 2013 to 2017, the stock photography website Unsplash used the CC0 license,[45][46] distributing several million free photos a month.

[50] Due to either disuse or criticism, a number of previously offered Creative Commons licenses have since been retired,[30][51] and are no longer recommended for new works.

[61] Creative Commons suggests the mnemonic "TASL": title – author – source [web link] – [CC] licence.

[63] In 2014 Wikimedia Deutschland published a guide to using Creative Commons licenses as wiki pages for translations and as PDF.

When the cases went as far as decisions by judges (that is, they were not dismissed for lack of jurisdiction or were not settled privately out of court), they have all validated the legal robustness of Creative Commons public licenses.

Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation required.

Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing a URL leading to the photographer's Flickr page on each of their ads.

However, one picture, depicting 15-year-old Alison Chang at a fund-raising carwash for her church,[73] caused some controversy when she sued Virgin Mobile.

The photo was taken by Alison's church youth counselor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under the Creative Commons license.

[74][75] In the fall of 2006, the collecting society Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) in Spain sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, owner of a disco bar located in Badajoz who played CC-licensed music.

[76] In February 2006, the Cultural Association Ladinamo (based in Madrid, and represented by Javier de la Cueva) was granted the use of copyleft music in their public activities.

The sentence said: Admitting the existence of music equipment, a joint evaluation of the evidence practiced, this court is convinced that the defendant prevents communication of works whose management is entrusted to the plaintiff [SGAE], using a repertoire of authors who have not assigned the exploitation of their rights to the SGAE, having at its disposal a database for that purpose and so it is manifested both by the legal representative of the Association and by Manuela Villa Acosta, in charge of the cultural programming of the association, which is compatible with the alternative character of the Association and its integration in the movement called 'copy left'.

[78][79] In 2007, photographer Art Drauglis uploaded several pictures to the photo-sharing website Flickr, giving them the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-SA).

", was downloaded by Kappa Map Group, a map-making company, and published in 2012 on the front cover of Montgomery Co. Maryland Street Atlas.

The text "Photo: Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD Photographer: Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis, Creative Commoms [sic], CC-BY-SA-2.0" was placed on the back cover, but nothing on the front indicated authorship.

Drauglis sued the defendants in June 2014 for copyright infringement and license breach, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, fees, and costs.

Langner was later contacted by the Verband zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums im Internet (VGSE) (Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property in the Internet) with a demand for €2300 for failing to provide the full name of the work, the full name of the author, the license text, and a source link, as is required by the fine print in the license.

[88] The circle with an equal sign (meaning no derivatives) is present in older versions of Unicode, unlike all the other symbols.