Creative commons licences are a way of allowing your on-line work (e.g. writing, photography, graphics, or sound samples, etc) to be used by other people, provided certain conditions are adhered to, without affecting your original copyright entitlement.

There are several licences for content creators to choose from, depending on the degree to which they are willing to allow their work to be reused and distributed.

Creative commons licences seem like a sensible development in response to the growing amount of material that is published in the public domain that often finds itself in a grey copyright area.

These licences, as the byline “some rights reserved” implies, does not render copyright null or void, rather they serve as a guideline (of sorts) as to how people accessing material in the public domain can re-use it for their own purposes.