Difference between revisions of "Understanding Creative Commons Non-Commercial"

Revision as of 11:12, 12 December 2011

Species-ID, like Wikipedia is a non-profit venture, funded only by public research funds and private in-kind donations. It is therefore possible to reproduce works licensed under the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share-alike license on Species-ID. However, we recommend to use the Creative Commons attribution or Creative Commons attribution share-alike licenses instead.

In a nutshell: Although many people identify non-profit activities with non-commercial, legal analysis reveals that most non-profit activities must be classified as commercial under the terms of the Creative Commons licenses. If you make a living by selling copyrighted works (images, etc.), contributing content under CC by-nc-sa (the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share-alike license) is a valid option. Doing so will strongly protect your commercial interests. However, you are not using an open content license and the decision will strongly limit re-use of your contribution: non-profit-organisations, most scientific societies, Wikipedia, etc. will be unable to use your contribution. Do not choose the "non-commercial" option because you have no commercial interest and want to contribute to spreading information outside of profit-making corporations. If you do not make a living by selling your works, please consider sharing them as open content by supplying them under open content licenses like CC by or CC by-sa (the latter is used by Wikipedia and is equivalent to the GPL used for much Open Source software). Doing so will enable a much wider re-use of your contribution and increase the efficiency of informing people about biodiversity. The organisations profiting most from the license will be non-profit initiatives, which can use the materials without legal risk. However, a publisher may indeed, with appropriate citation or your authorship, use your contribution in a book that does generate a profit. Such dissemination of knowledge on biodiversity is not essentially evil and may be in the interest of biodiversity education. Thus, each contributor is encouraged to balance the potentially lost profits against the increased benefit to society.

This page originally held an overview by Gregor Hagedorn, Daniel Mietchen, Willi Egloff and Robert Morris written in 2011. The original work is still available by means of the page history. The authors have since published a revised and expanded version: Hagedorn, G. et al. (2011) Creative commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information. Zookeys 150: 127-149. DOI:10.3897/zookeys.150.2189. Please refer to this article for in-depth information.

See also

• Erik Möller 2007: Reasons not to use a Creative Commons NC license^[1] — an overview

• petermr 2010: Why I and you should avoid NC licenses — a personalized version of the arguments made in the link above

• Wikimedia Commons 2009: Licensing Justifications^[2]
• Rufus Pollock 2010: Why share-alike licenses are Open but non-commercial ones aren't
• Appropedia 2010: Non-commercial licenses vs open licenses^[3] — Gives examples of societal cost of NC license in the context of self-help instructions/development programs
• TheHelpful.com (undated): Creative Commons: So what is 'commercial use'? http://www.thehelpful.com/creativecommons/what-is-commercial-use.html

Related topics:

• Lawrence Lessig 1999. Reclaiming a Commons. Draft 1.01, Keynote address at The Berkman Center’s “Building a Digital Commons”. In: Lawrence Lessig, Charles Nesson, Jonathan Zittrain (editors): Open Code· Open Content· Open Law, Building a Digital Commons, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. — The vision behind Creative Commons: why expressions of ideas and knowledge should be shared rather than monopolized. http:/​/​cyber.​law.​harvard.​edu/​sites/​cyber.​law.​harvard.​edu/​files/​opencode.​session.​pdf
• learn.creativecommons.org (undated): Why CC-BY? — Note: All major OA publishers (BMC, PLoS, Hindawi, Copernicus, as well as Pensoft) - now use CC-BY as the default for their articles.
• Moving on from Copyleft — Provides arguments against using the "share-alike" clause
• Missing CC License - CC-By->2@ (full c for 2 years, then CC-BY??) — Discusses a simple example of a time dependent licensing scheme
• Panton Principles — They deal with data sharing but make the point that anything non-CC0/PD ultimately creates reusability barriers because of license incompatibility. Therefore, CC0/PD is recommended for published data resulting from publicly funded research. Attribution should be achieved by way of social norms within the scientific community, not via copyright law.
• Mike Linksvayer 2011: On licensing data base data^[4] — On database licensing and CC0 dedication (not about "non-commercial").