Which Creative Commons licences allow commercial use?

Three of the six CC 4.0 International licenses allow commercial use: CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC BY-ND. The other three, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, and CC BY-NC-ND, all carry the NonCommercial term and forbid uses primarily intended for commercial advantage or monetary compensation. The distinction is binary. If you are selecting a license for your own work or checking whether you can use someone else's work in a commercial project, identify the license tag first. Any tag that includes "NC" blocks commercial use. Any tag without "NC" permits it.

CC BY 4.0: The Broadest Grant

CC BY 4.0 gives you the widest permission. Copy, distribute, adapt and perform the work, including for commercial purposes, as long as you provide attribution in the manner the license specifies. No additional payment, permission or notification is required. The single requirement is the BY term: retain the creator's name, a copyright notice, a license notice, a warranty disclaimer and a URI or hyperlink to the material where reasonably practicable.

CC BY-SA 4.0: Commercial Use With A Viral Term

CC BY-SA 4.0 adds the ShareAlike requirement. Commercial use is still allowed, but any adapted material you share must itself carry the BY-SA 4.0 license or a license Creative Commons has formally named as compatible. The official compatibility list controls this. Do not assume two SA licenses are compatible without checking that list. If you share an adaptation under BY-SA, the original creator's attribution notices must remain.

CC BY-ND 4.0: Commercial Use, No Adaptations

CC BY-ND 4.0 permits commercial use of the unadapted work. You may not share adapted material under the license. Translation is normally an adaptation under 4.0. Synchronising music with a moving image is expressly Adapted Material. Whether cropping, excerpting, editing or combining creates an adaptation depends on applicable copyright law; the dossier says do not declare a universal boundary. Format-shifting alone, converting a JPEG to PNG, for example, does not create Adapted Material.

The NonCommercial term in CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND is defined in version 4.0 as use not primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation. The identity of the user, a business, a nonprofit, a school or an individual, does not decide the issue by itself. Advertising, sponsorship, fundraising, internal business use and mixed purposes all require context. The dossier explicitly warns against inventing a bright-line rule. If your planned use has material commercial risk, get separate permission or local legal advice.

A disallowed use under an NC license: a company embeds a CC BY-NC photograph in a paid advertising campaign on its website. That is primarily intended for commercial advantage. An allowed use: an individual shares the same photograph on a personal blog with no ads, no sponsorship and no product sales. The line between the two can be blurry, and the dossier says local law may decide specific cases.

Adaptation And Redistribution Rules

CC BY, CC BY-SA and CC BY-ND all permit commercial use, but they differ on adaptation and redistribution. CC BY is the most flexible: you can share unchanged copies, adapt the work, and share those adaptations under any license. CC BY-SA requires those adaptations to carry the same SA license, creating a viral chain. CC BY-ND blocks sharing adaptations entirely. You may still use the original work commercially.

For a reuser who needs to adapt the material, CC BY is the safest choice. For a reuser who needs to combine multiple works, check whether each input's license imposes SA. Two SA licenses are not automatically compatible. The official compatibility list applies. For a reuser who does not need to adapt, CC BY-ND removes the adaptation concern but still requires attribution exactly as the license terms state.

Irrevocability And The Direct Grant

All three licenses are non-exclusive and irrevocable once you receive the work while complying with the terms. The licensor cannot withdraw the license from you after that point. You cannot sublicense the material; downstream recipients receive an offer directly from the original licensor under the 4.0 framework.

Allowed commercial use: A podcast producer uses a CC BY-licensed instrumental track as background music in an episode that runs between sponsor segments. The producer attributes the musician by name, links to the license deed, and indicates that the track is unchanged. This is commercial use, the podcast earns advertising revenue, and CC BY permits it.

Disallowed commercial use: The same producer finds a track with a CC BY-NC license. The producer places it in the same podcast episode with advertising. Even if the producer attributes correctly, the NC term prohibits the primary purpose of commercial advantage. The use is a breach. Under version 4.0, the license rights terminate automatically on breach, though they are reinstated if the violation is cured within 30 days of discovery. Cure does not erase possible liability for the period of the violation.

The single most frequent failure: assuming a license is commercial because the work appears on a commercial website or because the reuser paid for a stock photo subscription. Platform terms and CC license terms are independent. The license tag on the work itself controls. A site with a CC badge may have additional platform-level restrictions that conflict with the license's permissions, exclusive sublicensing terms, download restrictions or DRM. Check the current platform terms and the exact license notice, not the badge. If the tag includes NC, the answer to which Creative Commons licenses allow commercial use for that specific work is no, regardless of where you found it.