Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

drew Roberts said:
> On Wednesday 09 March 2005 08:22 am, Evan Prodromou wrote:
>> Another case where the NC license is stupid and short-sighted.
>> Strangely, after 2 years of confused questions like this, the
>> creativecommons.org site still burbles about NC like it's the cure for
>> cancer.
>
> Would it perhaps be useful to search for some other form of NC that somehow
> prevents direct compensation without being so strict with respect to 
> indirect
> money?

The point of an author licensing a work under CC-NC is
to get free advertising, free samples, free fans, and free hype.
Give away enough of the rights that fans can distribute the work,
modify the work, but keep the rights to make money off the work.

Evan will love this part: NonCommercial is a market-economy license.

That is the whole point. It is a license crafted in the best interest
of the original author. The idea being to give away some of the rights
to leverage a fan base to increase your readers, listeners, and viewers.
But in the end, it is a license for benefit of the original author.

If you create a derivative of a CC-NC work, you should know up front
that you can never make money off of the work. And out-sourcing the
money-making to a third party is a shell game. The author choose
CC-NC because they wanted exclusive right to make money on the work.
Direct or indirect doesn't matter.

In fact, I think one of the CreativeCommons cartoons specifically
describes the scenario where Alice licenses her work CC-NC,
fans copy/distrubute/derive the work non-commercially.
Some one stumbles across it and wants to use it commercially
and so they contact Alice and pay her for the right to use
the work commercially. And they all live happily ever after.

That is the point of CC-NC. Some author doesn't have the
advertising, sales, and distribution channel of the big guys,
so they leverage some of their rights in hope of getting noticed.
WIth the point being that if they do get noticed, they get paid.

If you took someone's CC-NC work, created a derivative,
and now it's been offered space at a commercial venue,
but you don't make any money, then it's still a commercial
venue. You might try contacting the original author and
seeing if you can get permission to display the work at
this one show. Maybe they'll give permission on the idea
that they have a greater chanced of getting noticed.

But making a NC variant that differentiates direct commercial
from indirect commercial is missing the point of CC-NC.