A public-domain dedication from Creative Commons, cataloged by SPDX under the short identifier CC0-1.0. The rights holder (the affirmer) waives copyright and related rights worldwide, to the greatest extent permitted by law. Anyone may copy, modify, distribute, perform, and reuse the work, including commercially, without asking permission and without a legal duty to give attribution.
Where a court would refuse a full waiver, a fallback license still grants every affected person a royalty-free, irrevocable, unconditional right to exercise those same rights, worldwide, for any purpose. Creative Commons describes the result as the no rights reserved alternative to its six copyright licenses.
Waiver, then a fallback license
The legal code is a two-step instrument, not an attribution license in the style of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY) or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA).
- Waiver: The affirmer permanently surrenders copyright and related rights in the work, in all territories, for the maximum term (including future extensions), in any medium, and for any purpose, including advertising and commercial use. The waiver is for the public at large and is written not to be revoked.
- Related rights: The dedication is drafted to reach neighboring rights, moral rights to the extent they can be waived, publicity and privacy rights the affirmer holds in the work, rights in the extraction and reuse of data, and sui generis database rights such as those under Directive 96/9/EC.
- Fallback: If any part of the waiver is invalid, that part is preserved as far as the law allows, and the affirmer licenses the same rights on royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable, unconditional terms. If even that license fails in part, the affirmer promises not to exercise leftover rights against the purpose of the dedication.
There are no license conditions. Reusers are not legally required to attribute, share-alike, or keep the work non-commercial. Citation norms in scholarship and science still apply as professional practice, but they are not a term of CC0.
Patents and Trademarks Stay with the Affirmer
Section 4(a) of the legal code states that the affirmer waives, abandons, surrenders, licenses, or otherwise affects no trademark or patent rights. The human-readable deed says the same: patent and trademark rights of any person are untouched, as are publicity or privacy rights that other people may have in the work or in how it is used.
- Trademarks: Brand names, logos, and certification marks still need separate permission. Dedicating a dataset or a repository does not put the project name in the public domain.
- Patents: A recipient who practices an invention embodied in CC0 material does not receive a patent license from the affirmer. Creative Commons kept the tool to copyright, neighboring rights, and database rights so it would stay usable for scientific data without pulling patent bargaining into the dedication.
- Warranties: The work is offered as-is. The affirmer disclaims title, merchantability, fitness, non-infringement, and any duty to clear third-party rights.
Software, Data, and the Six CC Licenses
Creative Commons recommends against putting its six copyright licenses on software. Those licenses were built for cultural and scientific works. Documentation, game art, and music that sit beside a program can still use them. Source code is a different job.
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, Frequently Asked Questions
- Source: The CC licenses do not contain terms about distributing source code, which free and open source software (FOSS) licenses treat as central to reuse and modification.
- Patents: Many software licenses address patent rights. The CC copyright licenses generally do not, because patents often do not apply to other copyrightable works in the same way.
- Compatibility: Combining CC-licensed material with major software licenses has historically been difficult. One later exception is one-way compatibility from CC-BY-SA-4.0 into GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL) for mixed content and code, which is a special case, not a reason to license programs under CC-BY-SA.
CC0 is the public-domain tool in that family, not one of the six licenses. Creative Commons calls it compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and acceptable for software. It is still patent-silent. The CC0 FAQ notes that it has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative and that it does not license patent rights the affirmer may hold. That FAQ points authors who want a patent grant toward GPL-3.0 or Apache License 2.0 (Apache-2.0). The Free Software Foundation treats CC0 as a sound dedication for non-software works and cautions against it for programs for the same patent reason.
In practice the dedication shows up on research data, open databases, and some code and specification text, wherever the goal is the widest reuse under copyright and database law. For application code, public-domain-equivalent grants are more often compared with the Unlicense (a software-focused dedication with its own fallback) and BSD Zero Clause License (BSD) (a license with no conditions, rather than a waiver). MIT remains a short permissive license that still requires keeping copyright and permission notices.
| Instrument | Legal form | Attribution | Patent grant | Typical use |
| CC0-1.0 | Waiver plus fallback license | Not required | Expressly excluded | Data, databases, some code |
| BSD | Zero-clause license | Not required | Silent | Software |
| Unlicense | Dedication plus fallback | Not required | Silent | Software |
| MIT | Permissive license | Keep copyright and permission notices | Silent | Software |
For a public dataset or specification, CC0 matches the copyright job. For product code that may implicate patents, Creative Commons points authors to Apache-2.0 or GPL-3.0 instead.