Creative Commons NonCommercial license

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"Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial", also called "CC BY-NC", is the basic noncommercial license from Creative Commons. Cc by-nc icon.svg
"Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial", also called "CC BY-NC", is the basic noncommercial license from Creative Commons.

A Creative Commons NonCommercial license (CC NC, CC BY-NC or NC license) is a Creative Commons license which a copyright holder can apply to their media to give public permission for anyone to reuse that media only for noncommercial activities. Creative Commons is an organization which develops a variety of public copyright licenses, and the "noncommercial" licenses are a subset of these. Unlike the CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA licenses, the CC BY-NC license is considered non-free. [1]

Contents

A challenge with using these licenses is determining what noncommercial use is.

Defining "Noncommercial"

"Defining 'Noncommercial'", a 2009 report from Creative Commons on the concept of noncommercial media Defining noncommercial Creative Commons 2009.pdf
"Defining 'Noncommercial'", a 2009 report from Creative Commons on the concept of noncommercial media

In September 2009 Creative Commons published a report titled, "Defining 'Noncommercial'". [2] The report featured survey data, analysis, and expert opinions on what "noncommercial" means, how it applied to contemporary media, and how people who share media interpret the term. [2] The report found that in some aspects there was public agreement on the meaning of "noncommercial", but for other aspects, there is wide variation in expectation of what the term means. [2]

The Conference on College Composition and Communication commented that creators and re-users have their own biases and tend to interpret "noncommercial" in a way that favors their own use. [3]

Online magazine repeated the report's claim that two-thirds of Creative Commons usage was with noncommercial licenses and that there was public confusion about how people should reuse such content. [4]

Various bloggers commented that the ambiguity which the report exposed provided supporting evidence of the need to establish clarification and certainty into what it means to apply the license and reuse media under the license. [5]

Commentary

An examination of media use in biodiversity research publications reported that people both offering and reusing biodiversity media with the noncommercial license have a variety of conflicting understandings about what this should mean. [6]

Erik Möller raised concerns about the use of Creative Commons' non-commercial license. Works distributed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license are not compatible with many open-content sites, including Wikipedia, which explicitly allow and encourage some commercial uses. Möller explained that "the people who are likely to be hurt by an -NC license are not large corporations, but small publications like weblogs, advertising-funded radio stations, or local newspapers." [7]

Lessig responded that the current copyright regime also harms compatibility and that authors can lessen this incompatibility by choosing the least restrictive license. [8] Additionally, the non-commercial license is useful for preventing someone else from capitalizing on an author's work when the author still plans to do so in the future. [8] [9] The non-commercial licenses have also been criticized for being too vague about which uses count as "commercial" and "non-commercial". [10] [11]

Great Minds, a non-profit educational publisher that released works under an -NC license, sued FedEx for violating the license because a school had used its services to mass-produce photocopies of the work, thus commercially exploiting the works. A U.S. judge dismissed the case in February 2017, ruling that FedEx was an intermediary, and that the provision of the license "does not limit a licensee's ability to use third parties in exercising the rights granted [by the licensor]." [12] Great Minds appealed the decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit later that year. [13] The 2nd Circuit upheld the lower court's decision in March 2018, [14] concluding that FedEx neither infringed copyrights nor violated the license. One of circuit judges Susan L. Carney argued in the court statement:

We hold that, in view of the absence of any clear license language to the contrary, licensees may use third‐party agents such as commercial reproduction services in furtherance of their own permitted noncommercial uses. Because FedEx acted as the mere agent of licensee school districts when it reproduced Great Minds' materials, and because there is no dispute that the school districts themselves sought to use Great Minds' materials for permissible purposes, we conclude that FedEx's activities did not breach the license or violate Great Minds' copyright. [15] [16]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyright</span> Legal concept regulating rights of a creative work

A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States and fair dealings doctrine in the United Kingdom.

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers</span> Non-profit performance-rights organization

The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) is an American not-for-profit performance-rights organization (PRO) that collectively licenses the public performance rights of its members' musical works to venues, broadcasters, and digital streaming services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free music</span> Music in the public domain or under a free license

Free music or libre music is music that, like free software, can freely be copied, distributed and modified for any purpose. Thus free music is either in the public domain or licensed under a free license by the artist or copyright holder themselves, often as a method of promotion. It does not mean that there should be no fee involved. The word free refers to freedom, not to price.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creative Commons license</span> Copyright license for free use of a work

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electric Sheep</span> Volunteer computing screensaver

Electric Sheep is a volunteer computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver.

<i>Free Culture</i> (book) Book by Lawrence Lessig

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity is a 2004 book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license on March 25, 2004.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Software license</span> Governs the use and/or redistribution of software

A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Boyle (legal scholar)</span> Scottish legal academic

James Boyle is a Scottish intellectual property scholar. He is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina. He is most prominently known for advocating looser copyright policies in the United States and worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Share-alike</span> Condition in some free copyright licenses

Share-alike (🄎) is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licenses that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original. Copyleft licenses are free content or free software licenses with a share-alike condition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audio Home Recording Act</span>

The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA) amended the United States copyright law by adding Chapter 10, "Digital Audio Recording Devices and Media". The act enabled the release of recordable digital formats such as Sony's Digital Audio Tape without fear of contributory infringement lawsuits.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Remix culture</span> Society that allows and encourages derivative works

Remix culture, also known as read-write culture, is a term describing a culture that allows and encourages the creation of derivative works by combining or editing existing materials. Remix cultures are permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of other creators. While combining elements has always been a common practice of artists of all domains throughout human history, the growth of exclusive copyright restrictions in the last several decades limits this practice more and more by the legal chilling effect. In reaction, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who considers remixing a desirable concept for human creativity, has worked since the early 2000s on a transfer of the remixing concept into the digital age. Lessig founded the Creative Commons in 2001, which released a variety of licenses as tools to promote remix culture, as remixing is legally hindered by the default exclusive copyright regime applied on intellectual property. The remix culture for cultural works is related to and inspired by the earlier Free and open-source software for software movement, which encourages the reuse and remixing of software works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free-culture movement</span> Social movement promoting the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others

The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free content</span> Nonrestrictive creative work

Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content unrestricted by copyright and other legal limitations on use. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose, including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public domain</span> Works outside the scope of copyright law

The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds the exclusive rights, anyone can legally use or reference those works without permission.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Free Documentation License</span> Copyleft license primarily for free software documentation

The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities, the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient.

<i>Remix</i> (book) 2008 book by Lawrence Lessig

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is Lawrence Lessig's fifth book. The book was made available for free download and remixing under the CC BY-NC Creative Commons license via Bloomsbury Academic. It is still available via the Internet Archive. It details a hypothesis about the societal effect of the Internet, and how this will affect production and consumption of popular culture to a "remix culture".

A public license or public copyright license is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees. By applying a public license to a work, provided that the licensees obey the terms and conditions of the license, copyright holders give permission for others to copy or change their work in ways that would otherwise infringe copyright law.

References

  1. ↑ "Understanding Free Cultural Works". Creative Commons. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 mike (14 September 2009). "Defining Noncommercial report published". Creative Commons.
  3. ↑ Lowe, Charles (6 June 2018). "An Issue for Open Education: Interpreting the Non-Commercial Clause in Creative Commons Licensing". Conference on College Composition and Communication . National Council of Teachers of English.
  4. ↑ Gordon-Murnane, Laura (January 2010). "FEATURE: Creative Commons: Copyright Tools for the 21st Century". Online . 34 (1). Information Today.
  5. ↑ Allen, Christopher (14 September 2009). "Creative Commons Posts "Defining Noncommercial" Report". www.lifewithalacrity.com. Christopher Allen.
  6. ↑ Hagedorn, Gregor; Mietchen, Daniel; Morris, Robert; Agosti, Donat; Penev, Lyubomir; Berendsohn, Walter; Hobern, Donald (28 November 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 . PMC   3234435 . PMID   22207810.
  7. ↑ Moeller, Erik (2006). "The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License" (PDF). Open Source Jahrbuch.
  8. 1 2 Lessig, Lawrence (2005). "CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on Important Freedoms". Creative Commons. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  9. ↑ "On Free, and the Differences between Culture and Code" (video). 23C3 Who can you trust?. 2006. google video docid=7661663613180520595. Retrieved 7 February 2014.
  10. ↑ Haff, Gordon (26 November 2007). "Does the Noncommercial Creative Commons license make sense?". CNET . Retrieved 22 February 2015.
  11. ↑ Prodromou, Evan (19 April 2005). "Use cases for NonCommercial license clause". cc-licenses mailing list. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
  12. ↑ "Odd lawsuit fails to ding FedEx for allowing copies of CC-licensed material". Ars Technica. 27 February 2017. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  13. ↑ Cavanagh, Sean (20 July 2017). "Open Ed. Provider Appealing Decision in Closely Watched Lawsuit". EdWeek Market Brief. Editorial Projects in Education, Inc. Retrieved 23 March 2018.
  14. ↑ Vogt, RJ (21 March 2018). "2nd Circ. Upholds FedEx Win in Textbook Copying Suit". Law360. Retrieved 23 March 2018.
  15. ↑ Klasfeld, Adam (21 March 2018). "Second Circuit Clears FedEx in Education Copyright Case". Courthouse News Service. Retrieved 23 March 2018.
  16. ↑ Great Minds v. FedEx Office and Print Services, Inc.(2d Cir.21 March 2018), Text .
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