CC0
A public domain dedication that an NFT or other creative work's rights holder uses to waive all copyright, letting anyone freely copy, modify, and commercially use it without permission.
CC0, short for "Creative Commons Zero," is a legal tool that a creator or rights holder can apply to a work — including an NFT's associated artwork — to waive all copyright and related rights to the fullest extent the law allows, effectively placing the work into the public domain. Anyone can then freely copy, modify, build upon, and commercially use a CC0-licensed work without needing permission or paying any royalty to the original creator.
Several prominent generative art (see Kaavon's "Generative Art" glossary definition) and PFP collection (see Kaavon's "PFP Collection" glossary definition) projects have adopted CC0 licensing specifically to encourage broad community-driven derivative use and commercialization of the underlying artwork, trading away the original project's exclusive commercial control in exchange for potentially wider adoption and community-built derivative products. This is a meaningfully different intellectual-property arrangement than NFT projects that retain full copyright and only grant holders a limited personal-use license to their specific piece.
Examples
- A CC0-licensed PFP collection lets anyone, not just the original NFT holders, freely use and commercially build on the collection's artwork without needing permission.
- Unlike a CC0 project, many NFT collections retain full copyright and grant holders only a limited personal-use license to their specific individual piece.