Creative Commons
Also known as: CC license
Creative Commons is a set of standardized public licenses that let creators grant specific reuse permissions while keeping copyright.
Creative Commons (CC) licenses are a family of ready-made legal tools. A creator picks a license that signals what others may do — for example, requiring attribution, forbidding commercial use, or requiring derivatives to share the same terms.
Because the licenses are standardized and machine-readable, they make reuse predictable. The key is to read which conditions apply, since a CC license that forbids commercial use is very different from one that permits it.
License
A license is the legal permission a creator grants a buyer specifying how a digital product may and may not be used.
Public domain
Public domain refers to creative work that is not protected by intellectual property rights and may be used freely by anyone for any purpose.
Royalty-free
Royalty-free means that after the initial purchase or license, the work can be used without paying recurring fees per use.
Put Creative Commons to work this week.
Knowing the term is step one. The business kits ship the systems and templates that turn concepts like this into a running operation.