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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] BY-NC-SA and commercial use - wholesale copying, with ads

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: James Grimmelmann <james AT grimmelmann.net>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] BY-NC-SA and commercial use - wholesale copying, with ads
  • Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2007 09:13:19 -0500

Improbulus wrote:
The BY-NC-SA licence says "You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation."

I think this means that if a website copies my entire blog post wholesale (admittedly with a link to my original post at the end) but without adding any comment or original content of their own, and just runs a bunch of Google AdSense ads on the same page, it is clearly copying my post in a manner "primarily" intended for monetary compensation. And therefore violating the terms of the BY-NC-SA licence.

My understanding is that this violates the NonCommercial guidelines. (Those guidelines aren't part of the license text, so they're not definitive on the matter, but they are strongly indicative.) It's also inconsistent with most people's sense of what is noncommercial.

Especially when it's been copying lots of my posts, a separate page on the website for each post again with no original content, and running ads on every one of those pages.

Is this correct, please? Seems to be, from this post https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2006-January/003108.html, but I'd be grateful for views. (And if anyone has any ideas as to how I can stop them, I'd be grateful to hear it too!)

You might report the site to Google: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
and to Yahoo:
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam
By indicating that the content is duplicated, you may help in getting the search engines to stop returning it as a result, thereby drying up the flow of revenue from showing the ads.

This is not legal advice, etc.

James




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