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About this tool
Answer two questions to get the right Creative Commons 4.0 licence, what it permits, and ready-made attribution text in plain form and HTML.
The Creative Commons Licence Picker maps the two questions the licence suite is built on — may others use the work commercially, and may they share adaptations — onto the six Creative Commons 4.0 licences and the CC0 public domain dedication. Alongside the recommended licence it lists exactly what a reuser may and may not do, flags the traps that catch first-time licensors, and generates attribution in the Title-Author-Source-Licence pattern Creative Commons recommends, in both plain text and HTML. It is aimed at photographers, writers, educators, musicians and open data publishers deciding how to release their own work. It is informational only and is not legal advice.
Open Creative Commons Licence Picker on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
The chooser reproduces the actual licence logic, including that ND and SA cannot be combined.
Both plain text and an HTML snippet with rel="license", following the Title, Author, Source, Licence pattern.
Irrevocability, the vagueness of NC, and the unsuitability of CC for software are all surfaced up front.
If you simply want your work reused with credit, CC BY 4.0 is the standard choice. Add SA if you want adaptations to stay open under the same terms, add NC if you want to keep commercial uses for yourself to license separately, and add ND only if the work must never be published in altered form. CC0 waives everything, including the credit.
You can stop offering the work under it, but you cannot take back licences already granted. CC licences are irrevocable, so anyone who received a copy while it was published keeps their rights permanently. You do keep the copyright and can license the same work to others on different terms in parallel.
ShareAlike allows adaptations but requires each one to carry the same licence, which keeps the derivative chain open. NoDerivatives goes the other way and forbids publishing adapted versions at all — no crops, no translations, no remixes. They are mutually exclusive, which is why no CC licence contains both.
It bars uses primarily intended for commercial advantage or monetary compensation, but Creative Commons deliberately left the boundary undefined. Whether a fee-charging school, a nonprofit, or an ad-supported blog counts is genuinely unsettled, and that uncertainty tends to stop cautious reusers rather than only the ones you had in mind.