Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Paul Keller <pk AT kl.nl>]

hi all, 
i would like to contribute another perspective to this (and the other NC 
related) discussion(s) which i have been following on this list but also as 
being Public Lead for CC Netherlands since 2005 where the question of how to 
define NC uses is one of the most frequently encountered ones. Over the years 
these questions and the discussions on this and other list have actually 
brought me to the conclusion that the current definition of NC use in the 
licenses it the best possible definition that we can have and as a result it 
should not be changed or modified at all (never fix a running system as they 
say).

I am saying this from the perspective of someone reprseneting CC 
(Netherlands) and not from the perspective of a user. This is an important 
distinction because almost all the arguments on this list and elsewhere 
involve users who argue to make their specific interpretation the default 
one. What does seem to make sense from a number of specific perspectives 
would be a very dangerous and foolish move from the perspective of the 
overall system. It will make some specific groups of users more comfortable 
but it will certainly alienate others. The one thing that we know for sure 
(from the NC study from a couple of years back) is that there is no agreement 
among users of the CC licenses as to what constitutes commercial use of a 
licensed work.

The beauty of the current definition of non-commercial is that it is 
acceptable for a very large number of users. It is sufficiently vague to 
accommodate users with diverging views on what constitutes non-commercial use 
(as illustrated by David and many others on the lists) while functioning 
reasonably well. Yes, it creates a lot of questions by first time users 
(which in my experience is a good thing since that gets them into discussions 
about what they want to achieve and quite frequently lets them arrive at the 
conclusion that they should not use NC) and yes, it creates a lot of 
discussion on this list (which let's face it is not a good representation of 
the users base). 

On the other hand the current NC provision has not created any major problems 
in the wild. Given the intensity of the discussions here one would expect 
that there are frequent conflicts between licensors and licensees of NC 
licensed material but that is simply not the case. Yes, there may be some who 
decide against licensing something under NC because they do not like the 
definition, and there are some who refrain from using NC material because 
they believe that the definition insufficiently covers the intended use, but 
this will always be the case. Changing the NC definition carries the risk 
that we will alienate substantial existing user groups which is something 
that we should absolutely avoid. It is also worth noting that where there 
have been actual conflicts (like in the Adam Curry case the NC provision has 
worked as intended (see: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5823)

Given this i have come to the conclusion that the definition of commercial 
use as it exists today is remarkably robust and probably very close to the 
best possible definition (and as such the original drafters of the licenses 
must be complimented with their wise choice of language). Given this i think 
that the best thing that we can do is to leave the current wording intact. 
Given that it has been around for 10 years and has not created any real world 
problems we should conclude that the definition is not broken and that there 
is no need to fix it (or even tinker with it). 

Or to answer Davids question. we can be pretty sure that 4.0 will not make NC 
clause problems worse as long as we do not change the definition (and yes we 
should also keep language similar in function to the current Section 8 
Subsection e) /paul