There Is No Product Identity Here

The short answer. If you apply CC BY 4.0 to a work, you license what you applied it to. The license has no “Product Identity” or “Reserved Material” feature. What it offers instead is that you choose what the license is applied to, and it licenses only that.

• The phrases “Product Identity” and “Reserved Material” do not appear in the license text.
• Section 2(a)(1) grants rights in “the Licensed Material”, which Section 1(f) defines: Licensed Material means the artistic or literary work, database, or other material to which the Licensor applied this Public License. Read Section 1.
• Section 2(b)(2): Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License.
• The informational text that precedes the license, which says it does not form part of the license, advises: Licensors should clearly mark any material not subject to the license.

Say, next to the license notice, which elements are not offered under CC BY and that no license is granted to them. Two constraints follow from the text:

• Say “not licensed”, never “you may not use”. Section 2(a)(5)(b) bars you from imposing additional or different terms or conditions on the Licensed Material that restrict recipients. A statement that an element is not part of what you licensed is not a restriction on licensed material; a rule against using licensed material would be.
• Trademark rights are not licensed in any case (Section 2(b)(2)), so a name that is your trademark is not licensed just because CC BY is applied to the text around it.

A sentence you could use:

[Element] is not offered under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and no license is granted to it.

This is the guide's suggested wording, not a statement from the license or from Creative Commons. The SRBDE Council approved this guide copy for public release after lawyer review on 2026-10-28. This guide does not promise any publish path on this site.

You cannot retract the license for copies already shared. Section 6(c) says the licensor may stop distributing the Licensed Material at any time; however, doing so will not terminate this Public License, and Section 2(a)(1) calls the license irrevocable. Decide what is outside the license before you release.

Whether a late “not licensed” statement could ever reach material already shared is not answered by the text, and we do not claim an answer. The OGL equivalent is What You Can and Cannot Take Back.