Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <christian AT fluendo.com>]

I think that the non-commercial option is the biggest mistake CC ever
made, it is just to wide reaching and greyzone. Free and Open Source
software never did this differentiation and I think its was the smartest
decision ever. 

What constitutes a commercial activity is just to wide reaching 
and can cover almost every activity apart from downloading something to
put in a school paper or play on your own machine.

One could even claim that CC itself couldn't host a file with the
non-commercial clause as CC would then be using it to market itself and
thus get more monetary donations. 

Another example, could IBM set up a site called cc.ibm.com. Which
contains no adds or any other form of income generating activity, or
would it qualify as a commercial activity as it builds up goodwill
capital for IBM and probably also makes people look at other pages on
ibm.com?

My point is that the border for where commercial activity starts is so
blurry that it makes the content useless for anyone who actually starts
thinking about the issue. The GPL have an equally stupid clause which
allows non-free 'system libraries'. Problem is there is no clear
definition of what that is.

If CC ditched the whole non-commercial part it might mean that less
content in total would be contributed short term, but I am sure it would
also mean that a lot of the stuff which today gets marked as
non-commercial would still be made available and long term CC content
would be more useful and probably more plentiful.

I have been involved in openclipart.freedesktop.org where we demand
anything contributed be dedicated to the public domain and that doesn't
seem to have hindered a huge amount of contributions to that project.

For my own company we have often considered setting up a Ogg Vorbis
webradio playing only CC licensed music using our GPL streaming server,
but since most of the content out there is non-commercial we are
uncertain if we could play such licenses music or if the radio station
would be deemed an advertisement for our technologies and due to that
constitute a commercial activity.

I know that getting CC to ditch their non-commercial clause is almost
impossible at this point, but I just had to rant a bit about it ::)

Christian

On Tue, 2006-01-10 at 00:25 -0800, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-07-01 at 18:40 +0100, Bruno (Nessuno) wrote: 
> > What if I put a photo released under the Noncommerciale licenses on my
> > website where also ad-banners are visibile (eg GoogleAdsense)? Do I
> > infringe the copyright in this case? 
> 
> It seems to me that the Work is being distributed for commercial
> advantage (ad revenue). So, yes, you are violating the license.
> 
> > And what if a commercial (ad based) tv broadcaster use the same photo
> > (or video also released under the noncommercial license) inside a tv
> > program? Do they infringe the copyright?
> 
> Again, the work is being distributed for commercial advantage. So, yes.
> 
> ~ESP
> 
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