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<!DOCTYPE html> <html class="client-nojs" lang="en" dir="ltr"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"/> <title>CC Attribution-ShareAlike Intent - Creative Commons</title> <script>document.documentElement.className = document.documentElement.className.replace( /(^|\s)client-nojs(\s|$)/, "$1client-js$2" );</script> <script>(window.RLQ=window.RLQ||[]).push(function(){mw.config.set({"wgCanonicalNamespace":"","wgCanonicalSpecialPageName":false,"wgNamespaceNumber":0,"wgPageName":"CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent","wgTitle":"CC Attribution-ShareAlike Intent","wgCurRevisionId":15096,"wgRevisionId":15096,"wgArticleId":5414,"wgIsArticle":true,"wgIsRedirect":false,"wgAction":"view","wgUserName":null,"wgUserGroups":["*"],"wgCategories":[],"wgBreakFrames":false,"wgPageContentLanguage":"en","wgPageContentModel":"wikitext","wgSeparatorTransformTable":["",""],"wgDigitTransformTable":["",""],"wgDefaultDateFormat":"dmy","wgMonthNames":["","January","February","March","April","May","June","July","August","September","October","November","December"],"wgMonthNamesShort":["","Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug","Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec"],"wgRelevantPageName":"CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent","wgRelevantArticleId":5414,"wgRequestId":"5e78e1ff132019e79301819d","wgIsProbablyEditable":false,"wgRelevantPageIsProbablyEditable":false,"wgRestrictionEdit":["sysop"],"wgRestrictionMove":["sysop"]});mw.loader.state({"site.styles":"ready","noscript":"ready","user.styles":"ready","user":"ready","user.options":"loading","user.tokens":"loading","mediawiki.legacy.shared":"ready","mediawiki.legacy.commonPrint":"ready","mediawiki.sectionAnchor":"ready","mediawiki.skinning.interface":"ready","skins.vector.styles":"ready"});mw.loader.implement("user.options@0bhc5ha",function($,jQuery,require,module){mw.user.options.set([]);});mw.loader.implement("user.tokens@0jp5kr8",function ( $, jQuery, require, module ) { mw.user.tokens.set({"editToken":"+\\","patrolToken":"+\\","watchToken":"+\\","csrfToken":"+\\"});/*@nomin*/ });mw.loader.load(["site","mediawiki.page.startup","mediawiki.user","mediawiki.hidpi","mediawiki.page.ready","mediawiki.searchSuggest","skins.vector.js"]);});</script> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=mediawiki.legacy.commonPrint%2Cshared%7Cmediawiki.sectionAnchor%7Cmediawiki.skinning.interface%7Cskins.vector.styles&only=styles&skin=vector"/> <script async="" src="/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=startup&only=scripts&skin=vector"></script> <meta name="ResourceLoaderDynamicStyles" content=""/> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=site.styles&only=styles&skin=vector"/> <meta name="generator" content="MediaWiki 1.30.0"/> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico"/> <link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="/opensearch_desc.php" title="Creative Commons (en)"/> <link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" href="https://wiki.creativecommons.org/api.php?action=rsd"/> <link rel="license" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"/> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Creative Commons Atom feed" href="/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom"/>  </head> <body class="mediawiki ltr sitedir-ltr mw-hide-empty-elt ns-0 ns-subject page-CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent rootpage-CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent skin-vector action-view"> <div id="mw-page-base" class="noprint"></div> <div id="mw-head-base" class="noprint"></div> <div id="content" class="mw-body" role="main"> <a id="top"></a> <div class="mw-indicators mw-body-content"> </div> <h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading" lang="en">CC Attribution-ShareAlike Intent</h1> <div id="bodyContent" class="mw-body-content"> <div id="siteSub" class="noprint">From Creative Commons</div> <div id="contentSub"></div> <div id="jump-to-nav" class="mw-jump"> Jump to: <a href="#mw-head">navigation</a>, <a href="#p-search">search</a> </div> <div id="mw-content-text" lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr"><div class="mw-parser-output"><p><br /></p> <div style="padding: 15px 15px 0 15px; margin:0em 0em 1em 0em; border:1px solid #F3E553; background:#FCFFDD;"> <p>This page is protected. Suggestions welcome on the <a href="/wiki/Talk:CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent" title="Talk:CC Attribution-ShareAlike Intent">talk page</a>.</p> <p>Also see <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8213">the blog post annoucing the release of this statement</a>.</p> </div> <h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Creative_Commons_Statement_of_Intent_for_Attribution-ShareAlike_Licenses">Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses</span></h2> <p><i>2008-04-17</i></p> <p><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://creativecommons.org">Creative Commons</a> is a not-for-profit organization that has created and serves as a steward for a suite of copyright licenses that enable creators to legally grant certain freedoms to the public and to clearly signal those freedoms to humans and machines.</p> <p>Creative Commons <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">Attribution-ShareAlike</a> licenses play a particularly important role in the Free or Libre Culture movement. This document lays out Creative Commons' intention as steward for this class of licenses.</p> <p>First, it is important to understand the activities Creative Commons undertakes as a steward of licenses:</p> <ul> <li>Create <a href="/wiki/License_versions" class="mw-redirect" title="License versions">new versions</a> of each class of licenses when warranted by community feedback and suggestions for improvements. As of this writing most license classes have versioned from 1.0 (released December, 2002) to 2.0 (released May, 2004), 2.5 (released June, 2005), and <a href="/wiki/Version_3" title="Version 3">3.0</a> (released March, 2007).</li> <li>Port each license to account for the nuances of copyright law in jurisdictions worldwide. As of this writing ports have been completed in <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://creativecommons.org/international">44 jurisdictions</a> in conjunction with local legal experts in each of these jurisdictions.</li> <li>For each specific license, maintain at a stable, canonical URL such as <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/</a> the following: <ul> <li>A license deed intended to convey the properties of the license in a manner useful to non-lawyer humans, including short textual descriptions and readily recognizable icons.</li> <li>Translations of the aforementioned textual descriptions, so that the license may be useful to speakers of as many human languages as possible.</li> <li><a href="/wiki/CcREL" class="mw-redirect" title="CcREL">Metadata</a> intended to convey the properties of the license in a manner useful to computers -- but for the purpose of making licensed content more discoverable and usable, not for turning computers against their owners with DRM.</li> <li>A copy of the license itself.</li> </ul> </li> <li>Develop, maintain, and encourage software and services that make Creative Commons licenses available at the point of creation and publishing, for example our <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://creativecommons.org/license/">web-based license chooser</a>, <a href="/wiki/JsWidget" class="mw-redirect" title="JsWidget">widget</a>, <a href="/wiki/Web_Services" title="Web Services">web services API</a>, and <a href="/wiki/OpenOfficeOrg_Addin" title="OpenOfficeOrg Addin">OpenOffice.org plugin</a>.</li> <li>Develop, maintain, and encourage software and services that make Creative Commons licensed works available at the point of discovery and consumption, for example a web search interface and browser plugins.</li> <li>Participate in standards efforts that facilitate the software and services above, for example the <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/">World Wide Web Consortium</a>.</li> <li>Maintain close contact with the communities that use Creative Commons licenses to ensure the licenses and associated tools are serving the communities well.</li> <li>Educate the public about the licenses and associated tools.</li> </ul> <p>Millions of creators and users expect Creative Commons to undertake these stewardship activities, and we recognize and attempt to follow through with this great responsibility. The responsibility to communities using Attribution-ShareAlike licenses is even greater, as many in those communities rely on Creative Commons to serve as a reliable steward not just in a practical legal and technical sense, but in an ideological sense.</p> <p>Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses are informed and inspired by the principles and lessons of the <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">Free Software</a> movement. Although certain Creative Commons licenses allow granting of relatively narrow freedoms, in this document we use Free and Libre in the sense used by the Free Software movement. As applied to content, these principles require a license to grant the following essential freedoms to ALL users of licensed works:</p> <ul> <li>the <b>freedom to use</b> the work and enjoy the benefits of using it</li> <li>the <b>freedom to study</b> the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it</li> <li>the <b>freedom to make and redistribute copies</b>, in whole or in part, of the information or expression</li> <li>the <b>freedom to make changes and improvements</b>, and to distribute derivative works</li> </ul> <p>These freedoms are taken directly from the <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://freedomdefined.org">Definition of Free Cultural Works</a>, and more thoroughly explained there. Thus, the first commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses:</p> <p><b>1) All versions and ports of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses MUST satisfy the definition of a Free Cultural License set out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.</b></p> <p>However, a license without the ShareAlike requirement could satisfy this definition. The crucial lesson learned from the Free Software movement is that Freedom is a public good, and the dominant Free license should not only grant essential freedoms, but protect those freedoms for all users. This is accomplished by <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html">copyleft</a>, which adds a requirement that anyone distributing a copy of a Free work or an adaptation (also known as a derivative) of that work grant to other users the same freedoms they received. The <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-3.0.html">GNU General Public License</a> is the dominant copyleft software license, indeed the dominant Free Software license (Creative Commons <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://creativecommons.org/software">uses and recommends</a> the GNU GPL for software).</p> <p>For its content licenses, Creative Commons calls the copyleft requirement ShareAlike. This requirement protects the freedoms of all users by requiring that adaptations of works licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike to also be distributed under an Attribution-ShareAlike license, or a license deemed by Creative Commons to grant and protect the same essential freedoms for all users in a compatible fashion. Thus, the second commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses:</p> <p><b>2) All versions and ports of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses MUST protect the freedom of all users by requiring that when an adaptation of a work distributed under an Attribution-ShareAlike license is distributed, the adaptation must be distributed under the same license, or a license deemed by Creative Commons to grant and protect the same essential freedoms for all users in a compatible fashion (to be clear, such a compatible license must also satisfy the definition of a Free Cultural License set out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works).</b></p> <p>As described above, the ShareAlike requirement becomes active when an adaptation of a licensed work is distributed. Creative Commons may choose to add language to future versions of its licenses specifying that particular uses constitute adaptations from the perspective of the license, where such may not be clear. For example, since version 2.0, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses have included language similar to the following:</p> <dl> <dd>For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image ("synching") will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License.</dd> </dl> <p>It would abuse the trust of licensors to add a clarification that narrowed the scope of what is considered an adaptation, for this would introduce a loophole by which the freedom of all users would not be protected. As such, the third commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses:</p> <p><b>3) Any clarification of whether a use constitutes an adaptation for the purposes of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses may only broaden the scope of uses considered adaptations rather than collections.</b></p> <p>When a copyleft license is widely used, it not only protects essential freedoms for all users, it <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/pragmatic.html">fosters the spread of those freedoms</a>. This occurs when people who may not know or care about Freedom as understood by the Free Software movement, but merely wish to use works that happen to be Free, release adaptations under a Free license in order to fulfill the requirements of the license. By the same token, if there are pools of Free content that may not be mixed because their copyleft style licenses are legally incompatible, the spread of essential freedoms is constricted. The fourth commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses could be seen as implicit in the second commitment, but it is important to call out separately here:</p> <p><b>4) Creative Commons will strive to enable compatibility between Attribution-ShareAlike licenses and other copyleft content licenses that grant and protect the same essential freedoms for all users (to be clear, any candidate for compatibility must also satisfy the definition of a Free Cultural License set out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works).</b></p> <p>While every work that expands the universe of Free or Libre content is important, Free licenses play an especially crucial role for works with many collaborators. Unless each collaborator agrees to contribute under the terms of a Free license, the work rapidly becomes unusable by anyone, as past contributors must either be tracked down, or their contributions excised, before the work may be distributed or built upon (except as permitted by fair use and other limitations on copyright). But Free licenses are not enough for massively collaborative projects. In addition to social and technical affordances thankfully beyond the scope of copyright, such projects need particular licensing affordances, particularly around attribution requirements. Creative Commons took a step toward addressing these needs in version 2.5 of its licenses, but there may be more to do in this regard. Thus, the fifth commitment of Creative Commons as steward of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses.</p> <p><b>5) Creative Commons will strive to ensure that Attribution-ShareAlike licenses meet the needs of massively collaborative works, while remaining useful for works with one or a few creators.</b></p> <p>Our final commitment is a simple restatement of one of the stewardship activities described above, with emphasis on Free and Libre content communities and Attribution-ShareAlike:</p> <p><b>6) Maintain close contact with Free and Libre content communities to ensure Attribution-ShareAlike licenses and associated tools are serving these communities well.</b></p> <p>If you are a member of one of these communities, take this as an invitation to help us meet these commitments to you. Friendly suggestions for improvement and criticism if we seem to go astray are equally valuable.</p>   </div>  </div> <div class="printfooter"> Retrieved from "<a dir="ltr" href="https://wiki.creativecommons.org/index.php?title=CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent&oldid=15096">https://wiki.creativecommons.org/index.php?title=CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent&oldid=15096</a>" </div> <div id="catlinks" class="catlinks catlinks-allhidden" data-mw="interface"></div> <div class="visualClear"></div> </div> </div> <div id="mw-navigation"> <h2>Navigation menu</h2> <div id="mw-head"> <div id="p-personal" role="navigation" class="" aria-labelledby="p-personal-label"> <h3 id="p-personal-label">Personal tools</h3> <ul> <li id="pt-login"><a href="/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=CC+Attribution-ShareAlike+Intent" title="You are encouraged to log in; however, it is not mandatory [o]" accesskey="o">Log in</a></li> </ul> </div> <div id="left-navigation"> <div id="p-namespaces" role="navigation" class="vectorTabs" aria-labelledby="p-namespaces-label"> <h3 id="p-namespaces-label">Namespaces</h3> <ul> <li id="ca-nstab-main" class="selected"><span><a href="/wiki/CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent" title="View the content page [c]" accesskey="c">Page</a></span></li> <li id="ca-talk"><span><a href="/wiki/Talk:CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent" rel="discussion" title="Discussion about the content page [t]" accesskey="t">Discussion</a></span></li> </ul> </div> <div id="p-variants" role="navigation" class="vectorMenu emptyPortlet" aria-labelledby="p-variants-label"> <h3 id="p-variants-label"> <span>Variants</span> </h3> <div class="menu"> <ul> </ul> </div> </div> </div> <div id="right-navigation"> <div id="p-views" role="navigation" class="vectorTabs" aria-labelledby="p-views-label"> <h3 id="p-views-label">Views</h3> <ul> <li id="ca-view" class="selected"><span><a href="/wiki/CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent">Read</a></span></li> <li id="ca-viewsource"><span><a href="/index.php?title=CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent&action=edit" title="This page is protected.
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