Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Kevin Feenan" <ktfeenan AT knomaze.com>]

Hopefully this is the right forum for this question

 

I've read through the 2nd draft and I'm still not seeing anything that addresses a situation one of my organizations is faced with that has been the subject of many absolutely horrendous, knock down, friendship destroying fights. I mean absolutely completely and totally ugly situations.

 

We run a conference on educational best practices.

We run it as a free conference to all participants.

We provide the materials after the conference free of charge and unrestricted.

We run the conference itself on a cost recovery basis by selling sponsorships to cover the cost of the conference, web servers, software, etc..

We have talked about including sponsorships on the website to allow the materials to remain free and unrestricted.

 

Both of the last two points however seem to violate the NC aspect of the CC licenses even though the intent is to ensure that the content is made freely available (something that doesn't happen currently for many education forums which remain locked behind library access controls and trade association barriers).

 

So what are we? CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-SA?

 

I've been insisting that we have to use the CC-BY-SA rating because, technically, we are accepting money to run the conference and while we are doing this on a cost recovery basis, it is still a commercial activity. We have others that are dead set against anything other than a BY-NC-SA rating as they do not want to open the door in anyway shape or form to other people thinking the works can be used for anything other than NC purposes.

 

I was really hoping that someone sane would include a limited commercial (LC) or cost recovery (CR) type provision that would allow for limited commercial uses for the purposes of cost recovery only, but not for blatant commercial exploitation. It appears as if all that has been done has been to continue to leave this massive gaping hole between the BY-SA and BY-NC-SA ratings neither one of which really account for what it is we are trying to do in this case.

 

Did I miss something or is that gap still just not being addressed as part of the most recent draft?

 

Kevin