The Creative Commons family, at a glance
Creative Commons is not one licence but a kit of interchangeable conditions. Four building blocks combine into the six public licences you meet on Sketchfab, Poly Haven successors, OpenGameArt and thousands of individual creator pages. Read the suffix, not the logo.
| Licence | Attribution? | Commercial use? | Modify? |
|---|---|---|---|
| CC0 | Not required | Yes | Yes |
| CC BY | Required | Yes | Yes |
| CC BY-SA | Required | Yes | Yes, but derivatives inherit BY-SA |
| CC BY-NC | Required | No | Yes |
| CC BY-ND | Required | Yes | No derivatives |
| CC BY-NC-ND | Required | No | No |
For a commercial studio, two of these blocks are landmines. NC (NonCommercial) rules the asset out of anything primarily aimed at commercial advantage - a paid title, a client deliverable, an ad-supported free-to-play build. ND (NoDerivatives) forbids adaptations, and importing a model into your engine, retopologising, re-rigging or re-baking it is almost always a derivative. That leaves CC0 and CC BY as the two you can build on freely, with CC BY-SA usable but carrying a copyleft-style share-alike obligation onto your derivative.
CC0 vs CC BY: the everyday choice
CC0 is a public-domain dedication - the creator has waived their rights, so you owe no credit and can use, cut up and ship the asset however you like. The only discipline worth keeping is a record of where a CC0 asset came from, because CC0 only works if the uploader actually held the rights to release it; a provenance note is your evidence if that is ever challenged.
CC BY gives you the same broad freedoms in exchange for attribution. This is the one studios break by accident, because the obligation survives all the way to release and nobody owns it. What "attribution in a reasonable manner" means in practice: the creator's name, the work's title, a link back to the source, the licence name linked to its deed, and - if you changed it - a note that you modified it. One tidy credits-screen line carrying those elements is enough.
Sketchfab's own licence tiers
Sketchfab layers two things together, and mixing them up is a common mistake. First, every free download is published under a Creative Commons licence chosen by the uploader (often CC BY, sometimes CC0, occasionally an NC/ND variant you must not ship). Second, Sketchfab's Store sells models under its own Standard and Editorial licences - the Standard licence permits commercial use in games and media, while the Editorial licence is limited to news and commentary contexts and must not appear in a commercial product. So "I got it from Sketchfab" tells you nothing on its own: a free CC BY-NC download and a paid Standard-licence purchase carry opposite obligations.
OFL: the same idea, for fonts
Typography has its own near-equivalent of CC BY - the SIL Open Font License (OFL), which covers most of Google Fonts and the majority of free display faces. OFL fonts are free to embed and ship commercially, but with two conditions worth recording: you generally cannot sell the font file on its own, and if you rename or modify the font you must not use any Reserved Font Name the author declared. A credit is customary rather than strictly mandatory, but many foundries request one - so treat OFL like CC BY and capture the attribution line while you have the source page open.
How the register handles all of this
Asset Licence Register ships the whole Creative Commons family, Sketchfab's Standard/Editorial licences and SIL OFL as built-in types, each summarised in plain English and linked to the authoritative terms. When you tag an asset CC BY, CC BY-SA or OFL it raises a missing-attribution flag until you record the credit line, and it collects every recorded line into a copy-paste credits block. Tag something NC or ND and it stays visible as a licence that does not permit commercial shipping - so the prototype asset gets caught at audit, not at launch.