Page:Shrinking the Commons.djvu/25

 The genius of the Creative Commons project lay in disaggregating all the policy decisions implicit in the pre-existing family of open-content licenses and permitting licensors to recombine them individually in whatever fashion best suited their intent. Creative Commons licenses present authors, in effect, with a menu of license criteria, each reflecting a particular policy decision, from which the author is free to pick and choose. The various possible license criteria (and the recognized Creative Commons abbreviations) are: All the publicly available Creative Commons licenses presently include the attribution requirement, leaving authors free to select “yes” or “no” as to each of the remaining three options. Although there are eight possible ways
 * Attribution (“BY”): should users be required to give credit to the original author and/or publisher when they copy or reuse the licensed work?
 * Noncommercial (“NC”): are users free to copy or reuse the licensed work for commercial purposes, or for noncommercial purposes only?
 * No Derivatives (“ND”): are users free to create derivative works based on the licensed work, or may they reproduce only verbatim copies of the original?
 * Share Alike (“SA”): are users free to adopt more restrictive licensing terms for any derivative works they create, or must they adopt the same license chosen by the original author?