Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Commercial Rights Reserved

cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Kuno Woudt <kuno AT frob.nl>
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Commercial Rights Reserved
  • Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:12:10 +0100

Hello Heather,

On 12/11/2012 06:56 PM, Heather Morrison wrote:
Noncommercial is not optimal either. However, from a language
perspective it is better than "commercial rights reserved" because it
gives the creator an opportunity to say that "this is outside of the
commercial realm". Things that are outside of the commercial realm
can be brought into it - however for some of us, expanding the
portion of the world that is outside of commerce is a very important
statement, and it's fine if it is vague.

But choosing the "NonCommercial" license is NOT an effective statement of something being "outside the commercial realm".

Some examples:

Music on Jamendo commonly published under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license, take a look at aXXo [1] for example. When you click "Download", you see this music is published under "Creative Commons : Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0" -- but this is obviously inside the commercial realm because Jamendo has "License this music" and "For professional use, get a license at Jamendo PRO" buttons all over the site.

Similarly, music published on magnatune.com is licensed [2] under by-nc-sa 1.0, but you can pay a monthly fee to magnatune.com for commercial usage.

There are even examples where you have to pay money just to get the work, the author does not offer free downloads. Though when you purchase a copy and download it, the copy you've received is licensed to you under CC BY-NC-ND. [3] [4].

[1] http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/661414/axxo
[2] http://magnatune.com/info/licensing (see bottom of page)
[3] http://theenigmatng.bandcamp.com/album/galactronic
[4] http://dvsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/some-wasted-years


Looking at it from the other direction -- As a software developer I am familiar with a lot of free and open source software. A lot of that software is created and used "outside of the commercial realm", but none of the commonly used free software licenses have a NonCommercial label or clause, or anything equivalent.


So, in summary:

1. The current NC licenses are often used for commercial reasons, to be able to sell separate licenses for commercial use. The creative works licensed in such a way seem to be clearly "inside the commercial realm".

2. There is a large collection of creative works out there, which is "outside the commercial realm", but uses free culture or free software licenses without an NC clause or label.


From that I conclude that using a "NonCommercial" license is NOT an effective way to make a statement that the work is "outside the commercial realm". It also does not seem necessary to use an NC license to foster a large commons of creative works which are created and enjoyed "outside the commercial realm".

If you want to make the statement that a creative work is or should be outside the commercial realm, I think you should do so separately from the copyright license. The copyright license is not an effective way to make such a statement.

-- Kuno.




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page