• Home
• Library
• Access and borrow
• Creative commons

Creative Commons

When researching and teaching, you may be able to:

• use content that other people have created and released under Creative Commons licences in your teaching materials and other presentations
• apply Creative Commons licences to your work to give others permission to use it in specific ways.

Creative Commons licences work alongside copyright. Copyright holders can use them to give others permission to use their work in specific ways under certain conditions.

There are four possible elements to Creative Commons licences: Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivs and ShareAlike. These can be combined into six licences. The Attribution (BY) licence is the most flexible. Creative Commons Australia provides more information about the licences.

The video Creative Commons Kiwi explains how Creative Commons licences work.

Find Creative Commons licensed content

Looking for images, sounds, videos and other material to use in your teaching materials and other presentations?

Lots of images, multimedia and other educational resources are available under Creative Commons licences.

Use CC Search to search for Creative Commons licensed content across a range of sources such as Flickr, SoundCloud, Wikimedia Commons and YouTube.

Library Resource Guides include some sources of Creative Commons licensed:

• Images
• Videos

Conditions of use

Conditions of use vary depending on the type of Creative Commons licence, so always check the licence before you re-use the content. A description of the licence and a link to the licence conditions usually appears near the work.

Material with 'ShareAlike' licences cannot be used in Deakin study materials as they do not meet this requirement.

You always need to attribute the original creator of the work.

Apply Creative Commons licences to your work

Are you the copyright owner? If you are the creator of a work and have retained the copyright you can apply a Creative Commons licence to give others permission to use your work in specific ways and retain some of your rights.

Use the Creative Commons licence chooser tool to create a licence by answering a few simple questions.

The Copyright Office can provide advice.