[Foundation-l] Creative Commons publishes report on defining "Non-commercial"

[Anthony]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at creativecommons.org>wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 7:52 AM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>
> wrote:
> > One interesting example the blog post brings up - a
> > nonprofit-with-ads, paying for hosting costs that way, is that
> > commercial? 60% of creators say it is non-commercial, whilst *70%* of
> > reusers think so - which really does begin to sound like a recipe for
> > unintentionally annoying a lot of people releasing material under the
> > license.
>
> It's not that bad. What you see is a scale where 1=noncommercial and
> 100=commercial, and creators rated the case you mention 59.2 on that
> scale, users 71.7 -- so creators see that case as less commercial than
> users, which is ideal if fewer disputes are a good outcome (and as far
> as I know there aren't many).
>

Fewer disputes are not a good outcome if it means the content isn't used in
ways which creators and users both want it to be used.  The ideal situation
would be one in which creators and users all rank any given situation as
either 0 or 100.

Of course one of the ways disputes are avoided is that users just
> avoid NC licensed content, as Wikimedia projects do. Kudos.
>

True, although the Wikimedia projects do so for a different reason than the
fact that the term "noncommercial" is undefinable.  Wikipedia was set up
intentionally with the purpose of allowing commercial use.  In fact, it was
set up by a for-profit with the intention of making money.

CC doesn't want to drop the NC licenses because they're popular.  But
they're popular because they offer something impossible to obtain.  For a
little thought experiment, imagine I wanted to create a CC-GOOD license,
where use was allowed for anyone doing something good, and wasn't allowed
for anyone doing something evil.  It'd be an incredibly popular license if I
could convince people that it does what it claims to do, but it'd be
impossible to construct such a license which actually does that.