If you haven’t read the well-reasoned article on FreedomDefined.org about not using the non-commercial (NC) clause of the CC license, please do. Recently I saw Benjamin Mako Hill give a talk about free culture, and he showed some graphics that are several years old about the proliferation of CC licenses, especially which types are used. Statistics from Creative Commons from two years ago still show a very high usage of the NC license, especially in comparison to the SA license.
The question I’m wondering is this: If your CC license choice is barely granting more rights than normal copyright gives, should you even both to license the content?
In other words, if you are not allowing anyone to even share the content if there is a hint of commercial activity, such as Google AdSense on their blog?, and they cannot make derivatives, so no remixing, why bother putting a license on it. What can they do above normal copyright? Copy it in its entirety? Might as well just link back to the source instead of mirroring it.
So, that is my question to Jon Phillips et al. Do you want us using any CC license just to spread the usage? Or should we stop using the NC clause and otherwise leave it under regular copyright?
It is indeed frustrating when you search for something to use in a larger project and almost everything you find is unusable: NC-ND, so in the end you just give up searching CC licensed content…
I have the feeling that a lot of people use CC licensed mostly because this is the “cool” (the “trendy”) thing to do, but in fact they do not want to give up any right, so use the most restrictive version, rendering all the CC tagging as useless.
I’ll prefix this all by saying I have yet to release anything under a CC license simply due to laziness (today I was working on my first piece [lame time-lapse video], actually, that I intend to release under a CC license), however, I think a CC-NC licensed work is far superior to one that is released under full copyright. Granted, it is obviously restricted. However, it is FAR more free to use than a purely copyrighted work.
I think the superiority of non-NC licensed works will become apparent once people start seeing their own NC-licensed works missing-out on the great remix culture that abounds with free software & content. But at least if someone releases something, even if it NC-licensed, then it still free to use in purely noncommercial works, which are abundant. Of course, this could also be the start of a legal quagmire…I think we need some guidance on the legal implications of using a NC-licensed work in the gray areas, such as the examples you’ve mentioned above (if they are even gray…?).
[…] where due: Karsten Wade blogged about this in his usual prophetic fashion about a week […]