Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

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

>> If you own the copyright, you can distribute content under CC-BY-NC-SA,
and do things like charge for the content. CC-BY-NC-SA, theoretically,
prohibits third party distributors from charging for the content, either
directly, or indirectly.

We aggregate the content. We don't make representation to own the content.
The copyright owner is essentially giving us permission to publish the
content and video them giving a presentation on their topic however they
aren't paying us to make the content available. So we need to get the
funding for the web servers elsewhere. We're not talking "harry potter" type
money but rather about $10,000 per year to conduct the conference virtually
plus look after all the back-end infrastructure. None of the funds are going
into salaries. We pay for infrastructure and specific services required
during the conference and everything else is handled by industry volunteers.

The $10,000 has to come from somewhere however ... so we get advertisers and
sponsors to cover that expense. It's not anything like Hollywood movies
where we are creatively trying to bury hundreds of millions of dollars in
perpetual cost sharing and marketing agreements. If we can't cover the
expense of the conference then we obviously aren't aggregating content for
that year and our sustaining cost drop to like $150/yr.

It doesn't make sense to me however for anyone to give content to a content
aggregator (for profit or not) and to then insist on including a -NC rating
on the license. Where do these people expect the money to come from to
aggregate their content? At the end of the day SOMEONE is paying to manage
and maintain the content. 

I can clearly see the difference between for-profit aggregators, who are
trying to generate excess revenues to distribute to shareholders, and
non-profit aggregators, who are only trying to cover the cost of the
service. But none of the licenses seem to make any distinction between a
for-profit commercial motive and a non-profit commercial motive. 

I don't know - maybe the core issue is not the -NC rating but rather there
is a class of creative commons activities that focus on aggregation of 3rd
party content (with permission of the copyright owner) which needs something
that is in-between BY-SA and BY-NC-SA as the first is too open and the
second is too restrictive. Maybe the term "commercial" is the wrong metric
to be focused on in this case. But no matter how you cut it this is a major
issue for educators and others doing research that need to make their
content available to 3rd party aggregators but aren't will to, or in some
cases can't, give cart blanc access to their IP - only to the right to
publish, promote, and recoup reasonable expenses related to those two
activities that benefit the copyright/ip holder.

Kevin