Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, teachers and students the freedom to handle their copyright in a more flexible way. The author (person having copyright) decides to under which conditions his or her work is allowed to share and (re)use by others. There are six (freely) available standard licenses that creators can use to grant copyright permissions to their creative work.
Offering your material under a Creative Commons license implies that the creator gives up his or her copyright. This means that he or she chooses to offer any user certain rights, rights which the user otherwise would have to ask for explicitly.
Here you can find an overview of the six most important Creative Commons licences.
Material that has been published under a Creative Commons licence is recognizable by the following sign:
