[cc-licenses] Version 4:0:Rebranding "noncommercial" to "commercial rights reserved"

Gregor Hagedorn g.m.hagedorn at gmail.com
Fri Apr 13 13:07:49 EDT 2012


On 13 April 2012 18:31, Heather Morrison <hgmorris at sfu.ca> wrote:
> "Commercial rights reserved" does not mean the same thing as "noncommercial". Noncommercial includes the concept that a work is meant to be primarily or entirely outside of the commercial realm rather than the creator reserving commercial rights.
> Some of us would like to broaden the part of our world that is not thought of in commercial terms - including many instances where people are paid for their work.

What you describe is what many believe the NC license is, but what in
fact it is not. You describe a totally new license. I would like to
see a legally workable definition for that (I have not seen one), but
please let us keep that to a separate thread.

With regard to the present NC-3.0 definition, CC cannot fundamentally
change the existing contracts. At most it can clarify the meaning
where there was room for misunderstanding about intentions. However,
Creative Commons can easily change the name, the label and the brand.
My present proposal is based on keeping the present very restrictive
legal re-use permission, while avoiding to label it with something
that sounds like a desirable "non-commercial realm" (and thus
misleading millions of people into believe the would contribute to
such a realm when licensing a work of theirs as "NC-3.0").

Gregor


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