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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] CC licenses version 4.0: some thoughts on noncommercial

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: Development of Creative Commons licenses <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] CC licenses version 4.0: some thoughts on noncommercial
  • Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:21:00 -0800

A few comments inline, but on top want to encourage people itching to
reply here to attempt to address treatment of/proposals for NC in 4.0.

If you want to address the general merits or lack thereof of NC,
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-community is probably the
better place, as such discussions become voluminous quickly (there are
some such threads on cc-community now, the 4.0 relevant bits to be
summarized and shared back here and on the wiki as time permits).

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Heather Morrison <hgmorris AT sfu.ca> wrote:
> A few thoughts towards the version 4.0 discussions, focusing on
> noncommercial:
>
> Noncommercial, to me, is NOT the most restrictive of the CC license
> elements, except in a technical sense. This is because noncommercial - the
> public sphere - is the very essence of the commons. As a long-term open
> access advocate, my considered opinion is that the strongest license for
> open access to scholarly works is CC-BY-NC-SA, as this is the license that
> most protects open access downstream.  As we move towards the development
> of a global commons, we need to keep in mind the society that we live in at
> present. The kind of license that may be ideal in the society many of us
> are striving for can be a danger to the commons in the interim. For that
> matter, in a society where sharing is the default, we should question
> whether licenses will still be necessary. Even at present, while CC
> licenses are most helpful in an open access context, I would argue that
> licensing should not be necessary; what is more important for the longer
> term is developing and articulating a culture of
>  sharing. CC licenses is only one of many approaches.

This mirrors some recent discussion on cc-community, but with
different conclusion on usefulness of NC. I'll expand on that there
and copy you when I have time, as it is definitely a
NC-general-merits-or-lack-thereof discussion.

> I understand that there is some genuine confusion about what constitutes
> commercial use, and that this may differ by region. For this reason, it may
> be helpful to further refine the license terms, and perhaps include two
> different types of noncommercial. Some thoughts towards this end:
>
> -       Is selling the actual contenthe common element understood by anyone
> who uses noncommercial? If so, is this clearly spelled out in the NC
> license?
>
> -       Education - learning and teaching - should not be considered
> commercial. Here is a post with my attempt to articulate this:
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/education-is-public-good-not-commercial.html
>
> -       Providing commercial services that support education is a genuine
> gray area, and one where there may be good reason to have two different
> licenses. Organizations that rely to some extent on print-on-demand
> services should be able to say no to this, while many creators who have no
> interest in bothering with this might want to say sure, go ahead. I
> strongly advocate for understanding the need for creators to make a living,
> and including those who share as much as they can while reserving some
> rights so that they can make a living in the commons. For this reason, I do
> not support efforts to remove those who choose noncommercial from CC.
>
> -       Advertising is another gray area. Here, I am wondering whether a
> key issue is not so much advertising per se, as the extent, and whether
> reciprocal services are offered. For example, an internet search service
> that leads users to CC licensed content and in the process uses very
> limited amounts of content is a very different situation from a commercial
> outfit creating a mirror site of a whole journal, publishers' offerings, or
> scholar's blog, and selling advertising on the mirror site, or a
> pharmaceutical company printing off thousands of reprints for their
> salespeople to take to doctors' offices. In the former case, I wonder if
> there are fair use / fair dealing arguments, at least in some
> jurisdictions. If not, would this give the corporate sector reason to argue
> for fair use / fair dealing exemptions? In the latter case, I think many
> creators do actually wish to prevent such commercial use, which may impact
> the moral integrity of the creator as well as potential economic i
>  mpact.

It'd be difficult to make NC 4.0 unambiguously more permissive than NC
=<3.0 and meet previous expectations (adapt BY-NC 3.0 work, release
the result under BY-NC 4.0, it appears that work is free to use in
contexts the orginal licensor likely would consider commercial) but
maybe there are clarifications that can be made in particular areas
which would avoid this. (It'd be less hard to make NC less
permissive.)

How would you define educational use? Adding another set of licenses
to the suite permitting educational use but not commercial use is
extremely unlikely. It'd make there be even less legal
interoperability among the CC license suite, make the suite more
confusing, create another discouragement from using fully open
licenses, and the idea has been rejected at least a couple times
through CC's history (there was a cc-education list set up in 2003 or
4 to explore this). It'd have to be newly explained why adding such
would make the world a massively better place, accounting for the
downsides, to have any hope.

> Many thanks to CC for great work advancing the commons over the past few
> years, and for the opportunity to participate in discussions towards the
> next round.

Likewise. Your posts on the dramatic growth of OA are most excellent!

Mike




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