What is an attribution non-commercial license?

Within the context of the Creative Commons, an attribution non-commercial license is one of the six main types of creative commons licenses. As explained by the Creative Commons: “This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.” Thus, this license expands upon the attribution non-commercial share alike license, because that license require the derivative work to have the same license, while this allows the user to apply a different license to the derivative work they create (although they still must attribute the derivative work and use it for a non-commercial purpose).

An attribution non-commercial creative commons license can be indicated by the use of the “by-nc” graphic.