Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Sarah Pearson <sarah AT creativecommons.org>]

Hi everyone,

Before we lock the legal code and publish the license suite, we have one final change to propose for the two ND licenses only.

We propose changing the ND licenses to make it clear that licensees may create adaptations so long as those adaptations are not shared publicly.

This change would make it unambiguous that adapting licensed works for
personal or private use is permitted under any of the 6 licenses in the CC suite. Because of exceptions and limitations to copyright, personal adaptations should already fall outside the scope of the licenses in most cases. However, there are reasonable arguments that this is not always true everywhere in the world. This change to the ND licenses would harmonize the result worldwide, making it unequivocal that such private uses are permitted. As a matter of policy, we believe this is the right result.

One benefit of this change is clarifying that text and data mining are permitted under all 6 CC licenses. Text and data mining activity should fall outside of the scope of copyright and the other licensed rights, but because such analysis often involves creating adapted material in the process, there is some uncertainty with regard to the licenses that do not permit adaptations. We gave serious consideration to pursuing an exception within the licenses that would specifically permit text and data mining, but this has proven to be especially difficult since the type of activity is wide-ranging and the field is continually changing. The definition of which activities constitute text and data mining and which do not is simply not clear-cut, and attempting to create one risks enshrining a soon-to-be outdated definition in the 4.0 licenses.

This particular proposal is generic, which is one of its strengths: while it is not specific to text and data mining, it enables these activities to the extent there was any uncertainty about whether an adaptation was created during the process. However, it doesn't solve the problem entirely. Under BY-ND, licensees still may not share adaptations. While the output of mining will rarely, if ever, constitute an adaptation, this could prevent sharing of the adapted dataset used for mining, for example. Also, where the content was under BY-NC-ND, licensees still may not create adaptations privately for commercial purposes. For these reasons and many others, CC continues to urge licensors not to use the ND licenses for scientific data, and we do not intend this change to make the licenses more suitable for this use. However, for data that is made available under the ND licenses, this proposed change would remove some possible barriers to text and data mining.

Because adapting works for private use often falls outside the scope of the licensed rights and because such private use does not meaningfully affect the rights holder, we see this change as substantively minor. But to the extent it resolves uncertainty over whether such uses are permitted, we see it as a clear improvement, with little to argue against it.

We will be posting updates to the html of the legal code to reflect this  change shortly. We look forward to your feedback.

best,

Sarah