[cc-licenses] Does this case falls underCC Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5?
Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts
cc-licenses at lists.ibiblio.org
Fri Sep 8 18:51:27 EDT 2006
Terry wrote:
>> The last line of that section is the link to the NonCommercial
>> Guidelines in pdf.
>
> And that, my friends, is my personal definition of "buried".
> *Opposite*, for all intents and purposes, from "published".
In comparison to the earlier guidelines, that is published.
> Raising the question: "Why?"
I'd suggest that CC is still trying to determine what it means by
"Non-Commercial".
Whilst the current guidelines are fairly clear, they leave some major
loopholes --- so much so, that I seriously doubt that the NC prohibits
what people think it is intended to prohibit, namely all commercial
usage of the material.
Rob wrote:
>The community seems neatly split over whether NC means "you cannot
charge for the use of NC content" or you cannot be a commercial
organisation and use NC content".
One set of the guidelines implies that even a 501(3)(c) organization can
be a "commercial" user, and hence ineligible to use material with an NC
label. [Political organizations are specifically listed as being
"commercial". There also is a footnote suggesting that perhaps
"religious" organizations are "commercial".]
Of course, the kicker is that that set of guidelines defines any use, by
any government agency as being "commercial". [IOW, the only
beneficiaries of MIT's material are other private institutions. All
government agencies are prohibited from using their material.]
> CC are going to have to upset someone at some point over NC. That
someone may have to be MIT.
I think it will be other universities that will get upset, when MIT sues
them for licence violation for using their material. [I wonder if MIT
deliberately chose the NC licence, knowing that no public educational
institution in the US would be permitted to use their material, under
that licence?]
> I'm also worried that the temptation to produce an "Educational"
license to avoid this problem will increase. An Educational license
would be really bad,
It depends upon what the "educational" licence says. As it currently
stands, all material with an NC licence, is effectively "out of reach"
of public educational organizations. An "education" clause might be
able to clarify that even though the organization is a public agency, it
may use the material.
xan
jonathon
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