Understanding Creative Commons Non-Commercial

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.

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 or its updatable wiki version for in-depth information.

See also

• Erik Möller 2007: Reasons not to use a Creative Commons NC license — 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
• Rufus Pollock 2010: Why share-alike licenses are Open but non-commercial ones aren't
• Appropedia 2010: Non-commercial licenses vs open licenses — Gives examples of societal cost of NC license in the context of self-help instructions/development programs

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.