Plaintext versions of Creative Commons licenses and CC0

Last Friday, we finally made plaintext versions of our core 3.0 (unported) licenses and CC0 available. This is something that many people, but especially developers, have wanted for a long time. For example, Evan Prodromou made a draft of plaintext licenses a few years ago, but these never became official.

But now we do have official plaintext versions. Here's a list:

• CC BY 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC BY-SA 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC BY-ND 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC BY-NC 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC0 1.0 legalcode.txt

For most works, plaintext legalcode probably doesn't matter as linking directly to the deeds (say with the copy-paste output you get with the license chooser) is good enough, even ideal. And it's important to note that the XHTML licenses are still the canonical versions. But for some projects plaintext legalcode may be a very good thing. For example, it is traditional practice in free and open source software projects to bundle your licenses along with your project. More and more FOSS projects are using Creative Commons licenses or CC0 for their non-software content these days, so having plaintext legalcode will probably be very useful in these instances. Additionally, some other projects which release their content in a way that is largely offline may benefit from plaintext legalcode.

If you need to provide licensing information about your work in a similarly plaintext way, you should follow this pattern:

<WORK'S NAME> by <AUTHOR'S NAME>

<WORK'S NAME> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work.  If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>.

… replacing <WORK'S NAME> and <AUTHOR'S NAME> appropriately. (The first line in this example is optional.)

This push for an official plaintext legalcode release was spurred by the recent work with the Free Software Foundation on establishing the compatibility of CC0 with the GPL. It is important to note here that while CC0 is acceptable for software, Creative Commons licenses are not acceptable for software. The usage of plaintext legalcode as described in this post is intended for non-software content.

Copy / Paste Examples

For reference, here are some easily copy/pasteable examples of how you would annotate your works for all Creative Commons licenses, as well as CC0 (which is listed last).

CC BY 3.0:

<WORK'S NAME> by <AUTHOR'S NAME>

<WORK'S NAME> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work.  If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/>.

CC BY-SA 3.0:

<WORK'S NAME> by <AUTHOR'S NAME>

<WORK'S NAME> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work.  If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>.

CC BY-ND 3.0:

<WORK'S NAME> by <AUTHOR'S NAME>

<WORK'S NAME> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work.  If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/>.

CC BY-NC 3.0:

<WORK'S NAME> by <AUTHOR'S NAME>

<WORK'S NAME> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work.  If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/>.

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0:

<WORK'S NAME> by <AUTHOR'S NAME>

<WORK'S NAME> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work.  If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/>.

CC BY-NC-ND 3.0:

<WORK'S NAME> by <AUTHOR'S NAME>

<WORK'S NAME> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work.  If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/>.

CC0 1.0: (note, see here if using CC0 for software)

<WORK'S NAME> by <AUTHOR'S NAME>

To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with
<WORK'S NAME> has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights
to <WORK'S NAME>.

You should have received a copy of the CC0 legalcode along with this
work.  If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>.