Are there official Markdown versions of the CC licenses?

Question

Official plaintext versions of the Creative Commons licenses are available. Are there similarly official Markdown versions?

Given that I don't know of official markdown versions for any open-source license, I doubt that they will exist for CC. — Bart van Ingen Schenau, Jun 15 '18 at 16:11
My guess is no since a Google search for site:creativecommons.org markdown turns up about 28 results, and an exhaustive look-through shows no promising pages. — apsillers, Jun 15 '18 at 16:24
@BartvanIngenSchenau As one example, the GPL family is available in many formats. For example, see the top of GNU's GPLv3 page: "The GPL in other formats: plain text, Texinfo, LaTeX, standalone HTML, ODF, Docbook v4 or v5, Markdown, and RTF." — apsillers, Jun 15 '18 at 16:25

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 02 '19 at 12:56

Many licenses require that the licensed work is accompanies by a copy of the license, e.g. GPL, MIT, BSD, GFDL, …. A Markdown version that can be copied into the project documentation can then be helpful.

However, the CC licenses can be satisfied by linking to the full terms, or even only mentioning the abbreviated name for the license (like CC-BY-SA 3.0). A Markdown version that can be copied into projects is therefore not as necessary, and is not provided.

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered May 04 '21 at 15:21

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I don't believe it's official, but they do exist at https://github.com/idleberg/Creative-Commons-Markdown/. It seems well maintained, at least at the time of this writing.

They welcome changes so if anything looks wrong, report it.

answered May 04 '21 at 15:21

colan

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score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 08 '20 at 13:55

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No. Creative Commons do not host a Markdown version of their licenses.

The license terms do not require that you distribute a copy of the license. If you want to distribute an official copy anyway, use the plain text version.

answered Sep 08 '20 at 13:55

lofidevops

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I have to remark that in certain countries license text has to be provided together with the licensed work in order for the license to be valid. For example in Poland linking to external license text is considered an "abusive clause". This is a legal requirement and no license text can subsume it. – Jan Stolarek Jun 13 '23 at 06:41

Are there official Markdown versions of the CC licenses?

3 Answers3