[cc-licenses] BY-NC-SA and commercial use - wholesale copying, with ads

James Grimmelmann james at grimmelmann.net
Wed Feb 7 09:13:19 EST 2007


Improbulus wrote:
> The BY-NC-SA licence says "You may not exercise any of the rights 
> granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily 
> intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary 
> compensation."
> 
> I think this means that if a website copies my entire blog post 
> wholesale (admittedly with a link to my original post at the end) but 
> without adding any comment or original content of their own, and just 
> runs a bunch of Google AdSense ads on the same page, it is clearly 
> copying my post in a manner "primarily" intended for monetary 
> compensation. And therefore violating the terms of the BY-NC-SA licence.

My understanding is that this violates the NonCommercial guidelines. 
(Those guidelines aren't part of the license text, so they're not 
definitive on the matter, but they are strongly indicative.)  It's also 
inconsistent with most people's sense of what is noncommercial.

> Especially when it's been copying lots of my posts, a separate page on 
> the website for each post again with no original content, and running 
> ads on every one of those pages.
> 
> Is this correct, please? Seems to be, from this post 
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2006-January/003108.html, 
> but I'd be grateful for views. (And if anyone has any ideas as to how I 
> can stop them, I'd be grateful to hear it too!)

You might report the site to Google: 
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
and to Yahoo:
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam
By indicating that the content is duplicated, you may help in getting 
the search engines to stop returning it as a result, thereby drying up 
the flow of revenue from showing the ads.

This is not legal advice, etc.

James



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