The following are a list of licenses which Creative Commons at one time offered, but which CC no longer offers or recommends. We have withdrawn these licenses either because they were not sufficiently demanded, or because we believe they conflict with values we consider important. While the URLs for these licenses remain, so any existing work licensed under these licenses will continue to maintain the same license, CC will no longer offer these licenses via its license chooser or other mechanism for any future work.
One feature that all of the licenses we currently serve share is that they all guarantee at least the freedom to share non-commercially. To those of you who support us because our licenses all permit non-commercial sharing, you can count on us not to change this policy except after an extensive public discussion.
In addition to deprecating the use of the licenses below for any purpose, Creative Commons has always disrecommened use of any of the core CC licenses for software. If you want to license software, please use the GPL or another free/open source software license, not one of the CC licenses.
| License Deprecated | Date Deprecated | Reason for Deprecation |
|---|---|---|
| Sampling+ | 2011-09-12 | Not compatible with any other CC license, inadequate demand |
| NonCommercial-Sampling+ | 2011-09-12 | Inadequate demand |
| Public Domain Dedication and Certification | 2010-10-11 | US-specific; co-mingled two very different use cases. Replaced by two separate tools: the CC0 Public Domain Dedication and the Public Domain Mark. |
| DevNations | 2007-06-04 | Did not permit worldwide non-commercial verbatim sharing, inadequate demand |
| Sampling | 2007-06-04 | Did not permit non-commercial verbatim sharing, inadequate demand |
| NoDerivs | 2004-05-25 | Inadequate demand |
| NoDerivs-NonCommercial | 2004-05-25 | Inadequate demand |
| NonCommercial | 2004-05-25 | Inadequate demand |
| NonCommercial-ShareAlike | 2004-05-25 | Inadequate demand |
| ShareAlike | 2004-05-25 | Inadequate demand |