Comments on: Deprecating Creative Commons -NC may not be a good idea.

By: CarlB

CarlB — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:52:55 +0000

The problem with the commercial CC-SA licences is that you’re basically feeding your content free to scraper sites which merely turn your text into gibberish, strip out images and repost to their own ad-laden, spammy pages in an attempt to fool search engines.

All that spam is now in direct competition with the original website for positioning in search results, the freedom to take the entire content of a site and dump it onto a commercial rival site does hurt the original project.

The search engines attempt to compensate by penalising duplicate content, but how does one decide which is the originating site and which is spam?

By: Samuel Abram

Samuel Abram — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 23:06:58 +0000

Hey David, what you’re saying makes a whole lot of sense. It just sickens me to see people on a “freehad” against certain CC options and then do it in the Orwellian name of “freedom”.

I have music on bandcamp that is CC BY-NC. The reason I have a NC license is so I can receive royalties (whatever little I can) from a collections agency and to make money off of my work. I also have a flickr page of photos I dedicated to the same license. The reason I put my photos in a BY-NC license is so nobody would make money off of them without me getting a slice of the pie.

I would also like to say that I think the SA condition is even more dangerous than the NC one for this reason: SA mandates that you use a similar or the same license, but it’s not always clear whether you can do that, thus inhibiting actual freedom. The NC condition may be confusing to the layman, but there’s a lot of “noncommercial” space out there that should be clear, like the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg.

My next album will be © All Rights Reserved, but I’m just experimenting with business models. I’d be more than happy to see it “illegally” downloaded and remixed (but not used commercially or sans credit).

There are some pieces of content I dedicated into the public domain, because I think BY and especially BY-SA are too restrictive.

If you are still pissed that some of my works are not copyleft or public domain, not to worry. I’m going to dedicate every piece of content I ever created into the public domain as soon as I die.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:18:04 +0000

Nigel – yeah, that model rights aren’t nearly as easy to act on a violation of as copyrights are. A copyright licence is arguably the wrong tool for the job, but I do see your point in terms of using something that will achieve the desired effect.

By: Nigel

Nigel — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:13:54 +0000

ll my kids soccer pictures are marked CC-BY-SA-NC. That allows parents and kids to make a collage of images for calendars, school projects, christmas cards, etc. This prohibits Addidas from using pictures of our kids in ads without our explicit permission like they could under just CC-BY (at least not without threat of lawsuit). And without depending on privacy rights that may or may not exist.

See Chang v Virgin. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/technology/01link.html)

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 08:30:05 +0000

Steve – yeah, I’ve added a bit on the other reason for the noncommercial ethos in Internet culture: that culture as it actually works these days is a string of copyright violations.

By: Steve Bennett

Steve Bennett — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 07:44:09 +0000

Dammit, as usual, you’re right and I don’t have much to add. NC is really painful in reality – is an academic institution “commercial”? And the sooner everyone comes around to the view that other people making money off your content is a good thing, not a bad, the better off we’ll all be.

There’s a tiny proportion of us free content creators who ever had any pretentions of making a living from our stuff. Maybe -NC is useful to them, but for everyone else, I think it creates an unnecessary and complicated choice: “Wait, should I allow commercial use? Maybe I shouldn’t.”

OTOH, simply scrapping something because we’d prefer it didn’t exist creates all kinds of other problems.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:23:19 +0000

Which is what Erik's essay says. I suppose I mean that we can't kill it yet.

By: Nemo

Nemo — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:20:27 +0000

However, they’re right that the name NonCommercial is highly misleading and something like CommercialMonopoly is better:
1) I so, so, so often bumped into people telling me “oh, but I’m doing this thing for free, not for [anyone's] profit, so it’s a NonCommercial thing, I’ll stick to -NC!”.
2) Even those who understand what -NC means don’t understand that -SA is actually a better protection because bigger corporations “stealing” your work (creating a derivative wrok from it) for profit don’t want to release their work under any CC license.