The most permissive of Creative Commons’ six core public licenses, published on 25 November 2013. Anyone may copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material in any medium or format, including commercially, so long as they credit the creator, provide a link to the license, and indicate whether changes were made. SPDX records the short identifier as CC-BY-4.0, marks it FSF Free/Libre, and does not list it as OSI-approved.
It is a copyright license for creative works (text, photographs, video, music, and data), not a vendor End-User License Agreement (EULA) and not a source-code license. The grant is worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and irrevocable. Creative Commons frames that bargain as some rights reserved: copyright stays with the licensor, and the public may use the work on the stated terms.
Share, Adapt, and the Rights Left Out
The deed summarizes two freedoms, one condition, and a hard stop on extra locks. The legal code then carves out rights this license never conveys.
- Share and adapt: Copy and redistribute the material, and produce adapted material, for any purpose, including paid campaigns and product packaging.
- Attribution is the only license condition: Credit the creator (and any designated attribution party), keep copyright and license notices, link the license, and say if you modified the work. Do not imply the licensor endorses the reuse.
- No extra locks: You may not add legal terms or technological measures that stop others from doing what the license already allows. Wrapping a CC BY 4.0 file in a tighter EULA or encrypting it so downstream users cannot copy it is not a valid way to claw rights back.
- Patents and trademarks stay put: Section 2(b)(2) of the legal code does not license patent or trademark rights. Unlike Apache License 2.0 (Apache-2.0), there is no express patent grant. Brand marks, logos, and other Intellectual Property (IP) that identify the licensor remain outside the bargain.
- Database rights in 4.0: Applicable sui generis database rights are in scope, which is why the suite was written for governments and public-sector data as well as for articles and media. Extracting and resharing a substantial portion of a licensed database still requires attribution.
We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available.
Creative Commons FAQ, Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?
CC licenses have no source-disclosure terms and do not grant patents, so they do not behave like an Open Source Software (OSS) license. Put application code under a software license such as the General Public License (GPL) or the MIT License. Creative Commons still treats software documentation, game art, and music as in-scope, and it treats Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal (CC0) as a public-domain dedication that is acceptable for software (still without a patent waiver).
How Marketers Should Attribute
Creative Commons’ recommended practice is TASL: Title, Author, Source, and License. Version 4.0 lets you satisfy those elements in any reasonable manner for the medium, including a single Universal Resource Identifier (URI) that collects the details. Title is no longer a hard requirement (it was in 3.0 and earlier), but include it when the licensor supplied one.
- Title: Name the work when a title exists, and hyperlink that title to the original file or page.
- Author: Credit the creator or the attribution party the licensor named, including a pseudonym. Do not credit Creative Commons as the author of a third-party photo, icon, or track.
- Source: Keep a URI or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for the work to the extent reasonably practicable. Prefer the original public location over a shortened or rehosted copy.
- License: Name CC BY 4.0 and link the deed at creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. A license badge without that name and link is not enough.
- Modifications: Note crops, color grades, overlays, translations, and other changes, and retain notices of earlier modifications. An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted layout that still publishes the photograph is still a share of the licensed material.
- No endorsement: Credit does not mean the photographer, agency, or dataset owner sponsors the campaign. If the licensor asks you to remove attribution, 4.0 requires that removal to the extent reasonably practicable, even for an unmodified copy.
Put the credit where people will actually see it: image captions, video descriptions, slide footers, dataset readmes. Do not hide it only in alt text or EXIF. A Content Management System (CMS) theme can ship MIT-licensed code beside CC BY icons; each file keeps its own license, and the media still need TASL when you republish them. You may drop a CC BY 4.0 asset into a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA) compilation if you keep the BY notices intact. Share-alike does not attach to your own new work merely because you used BY material.
International 4.0 Versus Earlier Ported Licenses
From 1.0 through 3.0, Creative Commons published a generic (later called unported, then international) text and also ported versions adapted to local statutes, often in the official language of that jurisdiction. Those ports can differ on moral rights, collecting societies, and choice of law. Version 4.0 is a single International text, drafted to operate without localization beyond official translations. Creative Commons discouraged new 4.0 ports after publication.
Other 4.0 changes that matter when you reuse older stock: attribution may be reasonable to medium, means, and context; a URI to the material is required if reasonably practicable; rights terminate on breach but reinstate automatically if you cure within 30 days of discovering the violation; moral rights and the licensor’s own publicity and privacy rights are waived only to the limited extent needed to exercise the licensed rights. A Flickr still marked CC BY 2.0 or a government PDF marked CC BY 3.0 United States is not upgraded by the 4.0 suite. Comply with the version on the file, including the older title requirement on 3.0 and earlier.
| License | Built for | Credit and remix | Patents |
| CC-BY-4.0 | Creative works: text, images, video, data | Credit required. Adaptations may use another license that still lets recipients honor BY. | Explicitly not licensed |
| CC-BY-SA | Same, with share-alike | Credit required. Adaptations must use BY-SA or a compatible license. | Explicitly not licensed |
| CC0 | Public-domain dedication | No credit required. Copyright waived to the extent allowed by law. | Not waived |
| MIT | Source code | Keep the copyright notice. Permissive; no share-alike. | No express grant |