Comparison of Creative Commons
CC BY, ND, and NC licenses

Below are comparisons of the legal texts of three Creative Commons licenses: CC BY vs CC BY-ND and CC BY vs BY-NC. The license terminology comes from the Berne Convention, Rome Convention and WIPO so for example 'fair dealings' is generally 'fair use' in the United States and 'moral rights' including attribution and integrity may fall under an array of laws normalised by all Berne signatory countries.

No Derivatives: CC BY vs CC BY-ND

Except for the term and language surrounding "Adaptations", the CC BY and CC BY-NC licenses are nearly or entirely identical. Below are substantial clauses found in CC BY but not found in CC BY-NC:

(3.b) ... any such Adaptation, including any translation in any medium, takes reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to the original Work. For example, a translation could be marked "The original work was translated from English to Spanish," or a modification could indicate "The original work has been modified.";

(3.d) to Distribute and Publicly Perform Adaptations.

(4.a) ... If You create an Adaptation, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Adaptation any credit as required by Section 4(b), as requested.

(4.c) ... You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author's honor or reputation. ...

Commercial rights reserved: CC BY vs CC BY-NC

The CC BY and CC BY-NC licenses are remarkably similar. For the most part the language related to commercial interests differ primarily in whether the clauses have been placed in the rights granted (section 3) or 'restrictions' (section 4). The following grant exists in CC BY but has been moved to restrictions in the CC BY-NC license:

(3.e) [ Three clauses under the header "For the avoidance of doubt" related to the waiver of "Compulsory License Schemes" and the right to collect royalties ]

The following restrictions exist in CC BY-NC but do not exist in CC BY:

(4.b) You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

(4.d) [ Three clauses under the header "For the avoidance of doubt" related to retaining exclusive right to collect royalties ]

Plaintext diff

A plaintext difference (unified diff) of all of the 3.0 licenses. Numbers represent the number of different lines between the license compared in the row versus column.