Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>]

Terry wrote:
> >  The last line of that section is the link to the NonCommercial
> >  Guidelines in pdf.
>
> And that, my friends, is my personal definition of "buried".
> *Opposite*, for all intents and purposes, from "published".

In comparison to the earlier guidelines, that is published.

> Raising the question: "Why?"

I'd suggest that CC is still trying to determine what it means by 
"Non-Commercial".

Whilst the current guidelines are fairly clear, they leave some major 
loopholes ---  so much so, that I seriously doubt that the NC prohibits 
what people think it is intended to prohibit, namely all commercial 
usage of the material.

Rob wrote:

>The community seems neatly split over whether NC means "you cannot 
charge for the use of NC content" or you cannot be a commercial 
organisation and use NC content".

One set of the guidelines implies that even a 501(3)(c) organization can 
be a "commercial" user, and hence ineligible to use material with an NC 
label. [Political organizations are specifically listed as being 
"commercial".  There also is a footnote suggesting that perhaps 
"religious" organizations are "commercial".]

Of course, the kicker is that that set of guidelines defines any use, by 
any government agency as being "commercial".  [IOW, the only 
beneficiaries of MIT's material are other private institutions.  All 
government agencies are prohibited from using their material.]

> CC are going to have to upset someone at some point over NC. That 
someone may have to be MIT.

I think it will be other universities that will get upset, when MIT sues 
them for licence violation for using their material. [I wonder if MIT 
deliberately chose the NC licence, knowing that no public educational 
institution in the US would be permitted to use their material, under 
that licence?]

> I'm also worried that the temptation to produce an "Educational" 
license to avoid this problem will increase. An Educational license 
would be really bad,

It depends upon what the "educational" licence says. As it currently 
stands, all material with an NC licence, is effectively "out of reach" 
of public educational organizations.  An "education" clause might be 
able to clarify that even though the organization is a public agency, it 
 may use the material.

xan

jonathon