[cc-community] What does NC means?

Milos Rancic millosh at gmail.com
Mon Sep 17 03:39:01 EDT 2007


On 9/16/07, Peter Brink <peter.brink at brinkdata.se> wrote:
> Milos Rancic skrev:
> > 1. NC is not NC, which implies that even authors who have reasonable
> > reasons for using NC are not protected.
> > 2. It is possible to use NC for anything, which implies that we have
> > bigger and bigger mass on the Internet.
> >
>
> Do you have any kind of evidence for your accusations? If so - do you
> mind sharing it with the list?

1) Besides a number of commercial sites which host NC content and make
profit via using them (including YouTube and Flickr) without
mentioning that they *are* making money on NC content (are there some
note that you are not able to put someone else NC content there?),
there is a serious contradiction inside of the terms of such NC usage.

Making derivate works is the basic right for every SA license,
including BY-NC-SA (as well as BY-NC). If someone uploaded derivate NC
work to YouTube or Flicker, s/he allows third party to generate profit
by using NC content.

2) NC is basically useless outside of Internet which means that it is
completely useless in undeveloped countries. For example, in Kenya is
not possible to spread any work without their specific commercial
network. Also, even in much more developed countries in Europe it is
hard to spread any non-commercial document (how many non-commercial
"stores" do you have in your neighborhood?).

Also, NC content is becoming significant part of the content on
Internet (compare Flicker photos:
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/). And it is not possible to
make any kind of derivate work based on NC and non-NC content.

> Defining non-commercial is IMHO not, as has been suggested, such a
> tricky issue. Many jurisdictions probably have fairly precise
> definitions of what is meant by "commercial". Non-commercial is then
> simply "activities that are not commercial". Relying on what is stated
> on CC's website is not a safe route in this case. The non-commercial
> guidelines found there strikes me as being specifically targeted at a US
> audience. Authors from the rest of the world would do better to
> investigate how "commercial" is defined where they live.

Then it just mean that CC didn't want to make it clear. Because it is
still not clear what NC means in US jurisdiction.


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