[cc-community] What does NC means?

jonathon jonathon.blake at gmail.com
Thu Sep 20 15:15:26 EDT 2007


Giogos wrote:

> NC can be simply interpreted as "you can use/share my work but don't try
> to make money off that use". There is nothing very complicated about
> that.

If you think that is not complicated, I'd love to have an example of
what you do think is complicated.

> There will be cases where it is not entirely clear what constitutes commercial use, and the lawyers among us can battle it out, but this is beside the point.

That is exactly the point.

It is not "simple" by long shot.

There used to be a Canadian CD presser that point blank refused to
press CDs that contained NC licensed material, because doing so would
be a license violation.  That the CD pressing was at the customer's
request was irrelevant.

>Most people with a brain between their ears will get the simple
message that they should not try to make money from this work,

Define "try to make money from this work".

About the only thing that clearly implies is that a for-profit
organization may not sell the content.  (Creative Commons Foundation
Guidelines permit non-profits to sell the content.)(MIT OCW guidelines
prohibit selling of the content, but do allow for costs to be
recouperated for printing the material.)

Printing an NC photograph in a non-gratis newspaper is allowable under
CC Foundation guidelines.

> It is rather simple after all,

Here is how simple "Non Commercial " is.

MTI defines "Non Commercial" one way.
Creative Commons Foundation defines "Non Commercial"in a completely
different way.

Rights that MIT grants CCF prohibits.   Rights that CCF grants, MIT prohibits.

Explain why two organizations have different concepts about what
rights the license grants one.

>if you try to think for a second about how NC could work, instead of
looking for reasons why it won't work.

a) I think I've been one of the more ardent defenders of the BY-NC-SA
license.  (Go through the list archives.) Milos is merely pointing out
some of the more blatantly obvious issues that NC has.  There are a
number of other minor issues that haven't been mentioned.

b) I use BY-NC-SA 2.0 for most of my material.  I am looking at other
license options, because it doesn't prohibit what I thought it would,
and it might not allow what I reasonably expected it to allow. (At
this point in time, it looks like my best option is to modify the
CC-BY-NC-SA license to explicitly allow what I expected it to allow,
and explicitly  prohibit what I expected to prohibit.)

c) Thus far, the only scenario that has been presented, to justify
BY-NC-ND is a claim that it allows for legal file sharing.

xan

jonathon


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