View images according to their license
Note that the sum of each of these totals might be more than the total number of photographs on the site due to authors who dual-license.
CC-BY: 10 ∝ CC-BY-SA: 36 ∝ GFDL: 57 ∝ Public-domain: 31
Licenses
Open content licenses typically have terms of use such as
- Attribution
- ShareAlike
- Fulltext
Attribution means the author must be attributed whenever the work is used or redistributed. ShareAlike means deriviative works, if they are distributed, must be licensed under the same license. Fulltext means a full copy of the license text must accompany each use and redistribution of the work.
Two Creative Commons licenses that qualify as open content licenses are the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license, and the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA). The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), has all these requirements: attribution, sharealike and fulltext. It is more specific than the Creative Commons so if you are planning to use a GFDL work offline, best to actually read the terms of the license.
“Released into the public domain“ means the author has relinquished all rights to the work. So there can be no usage requirements or restrictions imposed by the author, since they have given up the right to impose such restrictions. Releasing work into the public domain means relinquishing all copyright claims on the work. Using a license, even a copyleft one, means you retain the copyright and that includes the right to control how the work is used. Different licenses set out different control restrictions.
Dual-licensing or multi-licensing means the author releases the work under the terms of multiple licenses. You only have to choose (and comply with) one of these to use the work.
Some common licenses (these links are for specific license versions):
