Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Marcelo Resegue <marceloresegue AT gmail.com>]

The original author may use his work for commercial use, even if it is 
licensed under by-sa-nc. The author reserves the commercial use for 
himself, and he is not giving you that right. That's all. He may even 
license his own work under a proprietary license for, for instance, a 
movie.That means:
1. Using CC by-sa-nc he gives everyone the right to use, modify and 
distribute his work, provided they are not doing it to make money 
(commercial), they share with the same license and they tell everyone 
that's the author's work.
2. Using another license he gives a movie company the right to make a 
movie, and that movie (derivative work from the original author's work) 
is under a proprietary license, not CC.

Note that the original author retains ownership of his work, so he may 
dual license it using CC and proprietary.

In the case of derivative work licensed under CC-by-sa-nc, things are 
different. The original author gave permission to others to create using 
his work as a base, so he retains ownership of the original work, but he 
doesn't own the derivative work -- that's the problem, nobody has the 
right to use the derivative work commercially.

The original author could contact the second author (the one who created 
derivative work) and ask for permission to use (re-license) the 
derivative part of the work (what he added to the original work). Note 
that he cannot sell that to anyone else, only the original author. And 
he cannot use it commercially even if the original author decides to use 
it commercially (he doesn't have that license, unless of course the 
original author re-licenses under CC-by-sa).

The whole point is, any derivative work is property of the second 
author, not the original one under current CC-by-sa-nc. And the fact 
that the original author doesn't know about the work is irrelevant (you 
cannot invent penicillin today, even if you don't know what it is: Louis 
Paster already invented it; and even if you get there by independent 
means it won't become yours invention).

Maybe, there could be a even more restrictive CC license for that end. 
Let's call it now CC-kp-sa-nc: Creative Commons keep property, share 
alike, non commercial. That means the original author gives anyone the 
right to use, modify and distribute the work, but he keeps authorship of 
any derivative work; that others may distribute that work and the 
derivative work under the same license only for non-commercial use.

Something to think about: will such a license be good for the world? 
Will it bring freedom because more people would adhere to it, or will it 
prevent people from going to "better" licenses? I don't know.

BTW, I'm not familiar with American law, but the principles are probably 
the same all over the world (most of it anyway).