Creative Commons Licenses: Exceptions and Limitations

2 situations where a user does not need a CC license.

1. When a student or instructor is using a work under Fair Use, that is an exception in the Canadian Copyright Act.
2. When a work is in the public domain. CC licenses are not applicable to works in the public domain. If you created a work and would like to dedicate it to the public domain use Creative Commons public domain publication.

It is up to the creator of a new work to ensure that there are no rights attached to the works used to create their own work.

To see how fair dealing applies to student work see our guide to Copyright Guidelines.

When considering using CC licensed work, you can still use it if it falls under an exception, like fair use. 

Exceptions and limitations as listed in the Copyright Act also apply to works with a CC license.

If you are using a CC licensed work for a class assignment, remember to include the license attribution (just like citing your sources). 

You can apply a CC license to anything protected by copyright that you own, with one important exception.

Software.

There are many free and open source software licenses that do that job better, built specifically as software licenses.

CC licenses only cover the copyright held by the creator.

They do no cover other rights, like:

• Trademark and patent rights 
• Third party rights (for example the right for someone to control their name, face, image or voice for commercial purposes).