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Creative Commons (or CC) is a type of license that eschews some conventional protections of copyright, but may retain others. The license is defined by the creator at the time of publication. As the CC website puts it, "Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, What can I do with this work?"

Check out some of the licenses below to get an idea of the different types of licenses available. For more information about CC licenses, click here. 

When combining or 'remixing' two items that have creative commons licenses, consult this chart to make sure the different licenses are compatible.

How to use it: Choose two works you wish to combine or remix. Find the license of the first work on the first row and the license of the second work on the first column. You can combine the works if there is a check mark in the cell where the row and column intersect. Use at least the most restrictive licensing of the two (use the license most to right or down state) for the new work. If there is a cross at the intersection of the row and column then you cannot combine these works. This probably indicates that one of the two licenses may not used for commercial purposes, or one of the licenses does not allow for derivative works to be created.

CC License Compatibility from CC Wiki is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.