Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Erik Moeller <erik_moeller AT gmx.de>]

Patrick Crosby:
> I have a question about the non-commercial cc license:
>
> Say someone created a community website where the users contributed
> content (i.e. a wiki), and when they submitted the content it was
> clear that the content would be licensed under a creative commons
> license that has non-commercial in it.
>
> Does the owner of the website have the right to make money off the
> content (through ad revenue, for example), or is the website itself a
> "user" and subject to the non-commercial portion of the license that
> the user contributed the content under?

Let's say you run a wiki with a shared hosting company that is funded 
using ads (like Geocities), and you don't choose *any* license. What 
would be the implicit understanding of the licensing terms? Contributors 
would, through their usage of the wiki, implicitly agree that the 
content has advertising on it. (As they would implicitly agree that 
others have the right to modify it, one of the working principles of a 
wiki.)

In the context of CC-NC* content, I think it's a similar scenario. The 
NC license itself would clearly forbid the ads, but the license is not 
compulsory -- there's no need for the site owner / hosting company to 
accept its terms. For them, the situation would be similar to a site 
that allows user submissions and has no copyright policy at all.

So, my understanding is that it would be OK for a wiki to have ads on it 
to begin with while being under NC, but it would be more difficult to 
justify putting ads on an existing wiki that doesn't have elastic Terms 
of Service. In that case, it would probably be best to provide some kind 
of agreement form for the user base, and an opt-out process to remove 
existing content.

In any case, as Robert pointed out, the site owner can always set terms 
of use that allow advertising in adition to the NC license that applies 
to everyone else. For a new wiki, that is probably the safest route.

That is, if you want to use an NC license at all:
http://intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC

Best,

Erik