Figma Community License: Explanation & Opinion

Hey @d3sign thanks for reaching out and asking this.

1. The community license is not required to be exclusive, meaning an author can always choose to license something under a different license in addition to the community license (such as an MIT license, or making something public domain). Figma doesn’t currently have a way for you to change the license as an author, so if you wanted to make community content available under an MIT (or other license), you would need to make that intent clear, either on the community page or by publishing the content on another website.

2. This is really going to depend on what and how much you took. We (Figma) can’t offer legal advice, but we can direct you to the CC by 4.0 license (available here: Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0) and the CC wiki (available here: Best practices for attribution - Creative Commons), both of which are excellent resources on what and when attribution is required for CC by 4.0 content.

3. Not 100% sure what you mean but this, but if I’m understanding this correctly, this is a question of how to handle cases where you need to attribute multiple people. Again, we (Figma) can’t offer legal advice, but the CC wiki (available here: Best practices for attribution - Creative Commons) discusses this issue, as well as best practices around attribution.

I hope this helps. 🙂

Hello, @Josh thank you for the explanation, the first answer is crystal clear, and I would want to see the default licensee to be Public Domain Mark or maybe MIT.

What I also can’t find on CC’s website is that what if you can find the original author of the design, in my case I have cloned a template then I don’t know the author of the design, so how can I use it after that?

@Josh I had a question as well about licensing and using mobile kits from the community. I’m new to Figma and learning to be a UX designer. So how do designers use icons and other buttons from the kits in the Community in their designs? I’m building a portfolio project and I’ve read the Creative Commons license but I’m still confused how to give attribution if I use a button or icon? I’m just wondering how designers build their real world apps with various kits. Thanks!

You should be fine to use the mobile kits in the community. I would just double check if there are any licensing restrictions from the creator. You can always leave a comment or reach out to them via their support contact.

Thank you @Josh I appreciate it.

Sorry @Josh , once more question, what is the Community Resource License that shows for using plug-ins like the Material Designs Icons Library. Is says under Restrictions that we can’t modify, translate, or create derivative works based on the Resources. Does that mean we can’t change an icon from black to white or more about changing the way an icon looks?