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You are free:
to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and
to Remix—to adapt the work Under the following conditions:
Attribution—You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.)
Share Alike —If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

Hi. This is what the Creative Commons basically says. I have a question now. I don't really know how to interpret the law and the terms. Let's take the following situation. If you take a website that licensed its content under CC and use the content for a future project, let's say index the number of times some words appear in the text. So, I'm not adapting the work and not distributing it. Do I still have the legal right to use the content licensed under CC?

Or if I take wikipedia and get the words that have a link to a page. Use those words to link the words that appear on my website to the same address. Do I have to disclose that I performed some indexing on Wiki?

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  • I'm not a lawyer, but every search engine crawler is indexing both copyright and Creative Commons text, so that's probably OK to do. However the fact that you say "...use the content... let's say index..." means that you might want to use it for different things apart from indexing. You probably need to list the other things you might want to use it for.
    – paulmorriss
    Jan 27, 2012 at 16:08
  • @paulmorriss for example, take wikipedia and get the words that have a link to a page. Use those words to link the words that appear on my website to the same address. Do I have to disclose that I performed some indexing on Wiki?
    – Andrew
    Jan 27, 2012 at 16:10

2 Answers 2

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First of all, if you're interested in corner cases, you really should read the actual license (the "legal code") instead of just the summary. I think that would clarify things for you.

Second, IANAL, but I doubt that the use cases you describe would infringe upon the original work's copyright, at least under most jurisdictions. Thus, you don't need a license to do those things in the first place.

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For the first question - I'm not a lawyer, but every search engine crawler is indexing both copyright and Creative Commons text, so that's probably OK to do.

For the second question, you are taking the text and links and remixing them. You are not just saying "for this word go to this page (on wikipedia)" like search engines do.

So you can do that, so long as you attribute and share alike.

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  • search engines also use the data to research trends, group data and are not attributing
    – Andrew
    Jan 27, 2012 at 16:51
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    When they do that they don't republish the original pages that they crawled, they just analyse it.
    – paulmorriss
    Jan 27, 2012 at 16:56
  • but are using the result in other ways :)
    – Andrew
    Jan 27, 2012 at 16:58
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    I still don't understand what you want to do. I'm not a lawer but AFAIK copyright protects the expression of ideas trough a text. Ideas or words can't be copyrighted. Creative commons only applies to content that can be copyrighted, as it's a general license agreement between the copyright holder and the copyright user.
    – Osvaldo
    Jan 27, 2012 at 17:24
  • @Osvaldo so to put it in other way, I can use the data to do research on it as long as I don't republish it? (I can use the results however).
    – Andrew
    Jan 27, 2012 at 18:10

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