[cc-community] Contradictory meanings of "non-commercial"?

Fred Beneson fred.benenson at gmail.com
Wed Feb 6 23:07:02 EST 2008


For what its worth there is similar confusion over the definition of  
what constitutes a "derivative" work.

In fact, there are conflicting court cases about what constitutes a  
derivative work when pairing text with images.

  This is important because CC's ShareAlike license is a copyleft  
style one that depends on derivative works to function.

My point isn't that we shouldn't use either because ready, hardline  
definitions are not available, but that there are always going to be  
fuzzy boundaries in this process no matter how we hard we try to nail  
down absolute terms.

For the majority of cases involving NC there seem to be contextual  
considerations that help users and creators understand whether a case  
is commercial or not.

See the 76 ball case or the virgin case (where a NC license would have  
saved everyone a lot of trouble) or the Dutch tabloid case involving  
Adam Curry.

And the more we discuss and analyze these cases the better: I believe  
we can come to a reasonable consensus on this, and to some extent, I  
feel like the CC licenses achieve this.

F

On Feb 6, 2008, at 10:41 PM, jonathon <jonathon.blake at gmail.com> wrote:

> Christopher wrote:
>
>> What is the sense of this apparent contradiction?
>
> a)  It is more of an unclear clarificatiion, than it is of a  
> contradiction.
>
> b) The human readable stuff it utterly irrelevant.  Anybody who relies
> on it, is begging to be sued for copyright /license violations;
>
>> does he  conform to the NC license?
>
> There are three major interpretations of what the NC license allows,
> and prohibits.  Whilst they aren't mutually exclusive, they differ
> enough that it is very clear that nobody is entirely sure where the
> edge cases lie, in what is allowed,and what is prohibited.
>
> It is possible for your hypothetical user to be sued for licence
> violation by one copyright holder,whilst given the blessing by another
> copyright holder, for doing the exact same thing.
>
>> (This happened in a famous Hollywood film, on which
>
> That has been standard accounting practice in Hollywood for decades.
>
> xan
>
> jonathon
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