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Open Educational Resources

News and information for UMGC Faculty on using OERs in the online classroom.

How to Mix Different CC Licensed Resources

Creative Commons licenses are designed for ease of use. Users can see in a transparent manner how your work is available for reuse. Things can become complicated however if you want to combine two Creative Commons licensed works, for example when making a collage or remixes of music. Not all licenses are in fact compatible. In the chart below we show which licenses are compatible.

Creative Commons License Compatibility Chart

Choose two works you wish to combine or remix. Find the license of the first work on the first row and the license on the first column. You can combine the works if there is a check mark in the cell where the row and column intersect. Use at least the most restrictive licensing of the two (use the license most to the right or down) for the new work. If there is a cross at the intersection of the row and column, then you cannot combine these works. This probably indicates that one of the two licenses may not be used for commercial purposes, or one of the licenses does not allow for derivative works to be created

Remix works with a NonCommercial building block

It is not possible to mix works where the first work is placed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license and the second work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The ShareAlike building block in first license requires that the newly created work is released under that license and can therefore be used commercially, the second license wants you to release the new work under a license that does not permit commercial use.

Remix work with a NoDerivative building block

It is not possible to create a remix where a NoDerivative work is a building block in the remixed work. All works that have been released under this License may only be distributed, not modified, in their original form. Also, there can be no cropping or lower-resolution images made from NoDerivative images, and no parts from NoDerivative works can be used to create other works.

CC License Compatibility from CC Wiki is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. UMGC has modified this work and it is available under the original license.