Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell AT gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 1:07 PM, Gregor Hagedorn <g.m.hagedorn AT gmail.com> 
wrote:
> On 13 April 2012 18:31, Heather Morrison <hgmorris AT sfu.ca> wrote:
>> "Commercial rights reserved" does not mean the same thing as 
>> "noncommercial". Noncommercial includes the concept that a work is meant 
>> to be primarily or entirely outside of the commercial realm rather than 
>> the creator reserving commercial rights.
>> Some of us would like to broaden the part of our world that is not thought 
>> of in commercial terms - including many instances where people are paid 
>> for their work.
>
> What you describe is what many believe the NC license is, but what in
> fact it is not. You describe a totally new license. I would like to
> see a legally workable definition for that (I have not seen one), but
> please let us keep that to a separate thread.

I was in the process of writing a similar message.

Heather's goals are admirable, but they're unsupported by the license
text (or, in fact the text of any content license I've ever seen
drafted). The are representative of a common misunderstanding of the
meaning of the NC licenses, a misunderstanding furthered by the name
of the license.  In reality,  NC licensing prohibits (or at least
makes excessively risky) a great wealth of activity outside of the
"part of our world that is not thought of in commercial terms".

> where there was room for misunderstanding about intentions. However,
> Creative Commons can easily change the name, the label and the brand.
> My present proposal is based on keeping the present very restrictive
> legal re-use permission, while avoiding to label it with something

I think the proposal to change the name is an excellent one.

I think that CC-CRR  "commercial rights reserved" might still be
surpassed with some additional thought by even better language— though
I admit I'd thought about this and never come up with anything as good
as that, I think the best I had was "Commercially Prejudiced license"—
but I think that "commercial rights reserved" is strictly superior to
non-commercial:  It reduces the confusion that arises from people
believing that NC licenses promote anti-commercialism (which they do
not),  and it strengthens that case where NC licenses have been
recommended where there wasn't confusion (when the creator hoped to
exploit the work commercially themselves).