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

[Hay (Husky)]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 6:04 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> Yeah. Not the most desired outcome for the creator, though.
>
> One of the benefits of CC is to encourage worry-free distribution by
> helping creators be entirely up-front about what they're happy to have
> happen with their material, but this sort of ambiguity seems to bring
> us full circle.

Just some thoughts.

The main problem with NC-licenses is the ambiguity of the term
'non-commercial' when reusing content. This research has shown that
the interpretation of 'NC' is pretty much the same with both users and
creators, even around the globe. However, that doesn't really resolve
the issue of ambiguity, as re-stating the definition in the license
itself, or creating more licenses has been shown in this report to be
a bad idea.

That isn't as big a problem for individual creators though. Reuse of
media will probably stay within the 'personal use' or 'redistribute'
limits, and the NC license mostly touches upon all cases where people
might make money from the content in a commercial way. Modifications
to the original media are not very common.

This isn't the case however with a project like Wikipedia, where mass
collaboration is the _basis_ of the medium and it is really inherent
to creating content. Any ambiguity on how 'non-commercial' should be
interpreted is likely to much more of a problem than with works
created by an individual.

That's why it's so important, for projects like ours, to use a license
such as BY-SA that it usable by anyone, at anytime, for any purpose
without that ambiguity.

-- Hay