Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

Todd A. Jacobs said:
> On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 01:42:02PM -0500, Greg London wrote:
>
>> 4.b says you may not exercise the rights granted in 3.b (create a
>> derivative work) if it intended for commercial use.
>
> It says "primarily intended." Note that it does not preclude commercial
> use per se, it simply says you can't excercise the rights with a
> primary intent of using it that way. *shrug*
>
> If I use a BY-NC work, release the derivative as BY (without "intent" to
> make money), then I'm technically free to do so. Then what might happen?

Look. Whatever you're doing with other people's licenses. Just stop.
Talk with an attorney. Or listen to some of the folks who've been
on the list for awhile. Otherwise, you're just going to make
a lot of people you put their work under a CC-NC license really mad.

You cannot remove the "NC" restriction off of someone's work.

The license GRANTS certain rights to USE, COPY, DISTRIBUTE,
and CREATE DERIVATIVE WORKS with the restriction that none
of those uses be commercial.

The license doesn't say anything about being able to
REMOVE A LICENSE RESTRICTION just because your intent
wasn't commercial. The license grants some rights on
how to use the work noncommercially. The license remains
unchanged.

You can use the work for whatever non-commercial use.
But nowhere does it say you can remove the NC restriction
just because your not "primarily intended" to commercial use.

Nowhere does it say you can remove ANY restriction.

You can add MORE restrictions to CC-NC.
but you cant take away what the author never granted you.
And an author that licenses their work CC-NC never granted
you the right to use the work commercially and never
granted you the right to remove the commercial restriction.

> Someone downstream to my license might legitimately commercialize
> something (with intent to make money), and still be in compliance with
> the license that they have.

Think about that for a second.
Alice licenses her song CC-NC.
Bob wants to use it in a commercial setting.

By your logic, all he has to do is find some
guy willing to claim he didn't "primarily
intend" to use the work commercially,
get him to remove the 'NC' restriction,
and suddenly Bob can make money off Alice's song.

If that were the case, CC-NC would be pointless
because all the corporate interests would be able
to find some rube to take NC off the license.

> This isn't meant to rekindle the (very lame) debate about liability for
> that sort of thing. Rather, the whole point here is that, without the
> requirement to release downstream works under a similar license, all
> sorts of weirdness ensues.

No weirdness ensues.

A CC-NC work will always remain a CC-NC work
until the original author decides otherwise.
no one else can make that decision.