LIcense question...
Which license do we pick if we want to specify NON commercial use only?
I have a piece I'd like to share, but I don't remember if the photoshop brushes were free for commercial or personal use only, so I think it's best to release it for non commercial use only. Yet I can't find which license to use for that. Or... isn't there one? o_0,
If there is some component not compatible with commercial use, you probably shouldn't submit it to OGA. All licenses on OGA allow commercial use. Sorry.
--Medicine Storm
Oh... :(
- Shozuki
I should specify this is not because OGA wants to cater exclusively to commercial projects (although being useful to such projects is a great thing!) It is really more about NC (non-commercial) licenses having the side effect of being very cumbersome for free and open projects, which is definitely something this site is all about. :)
--Medicine Storm
Noncommercial licenses are indeed highly cumbersome for many people and just about every non-trivial use case. Some seem to think noncommercial means the same as "non-profit"; this is not at all the case. Noncommercial is a much broader and harsher category than that. Something as trivial as having a few ads on your website can make a usage commercial in nature. Likewise, reselling copies of something even at zero profit is a commercial use under the prevailing legal understanding in most jurisdictions. Further, even if you don't directly sell, advertise, or license a CC-NC work, any commerical usage of any derivative of that work is still a violation of the license (pretty much regardless of how much you may have changed).
Personally, I think the noncommercial variants of Creative Commons were a mistake (and this should have been recognizable at the time). Can you imagine if the GPL or BSD licenses had prohibited commercial use? Next to nobody (besides a few academics) would be using Linux or the BSD family at this point. Allowing some degree of commercial advantage is essential to the growth and development of open cultural and collaborative ecosystems. Otherwise, people don't have sufficient reason to participate -- they might as well go their own way. At least then, they'd own everything and have maximum market leverage.
Some people respond to the above argument by saying that "you can always negotiate an alternative license". Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't -- depends on the copyright holder and what kind of bargains they're willing to make. More importantly, though, that kind of ever-present negotating each time you want to do something exerts substantial transaction costs on the whole system. It makes certain kinds of collections and heavy-mixing of many-party works outright next to infeasible because no one wants to spend that much time haggling with lots of independent people/groups. Probably worst of all, it largely defeats the concept of free culture by-default, which was supposed to be a huge part of the goal behind Creative Commons. Instead, you're stuck in the very same permissions culture that existed without the license(s).
Those are just my thoughts on it.
The problem with CC-By-NC isn't so much the NC part as the CC part in my opinion. It has no part in the 'creative commons', it's simply a handy license for distributing work that you only want people to be able to consume personally for free but not otherwise compete with your external revenue streams. Very useful and good for customers in some instances, but it has nothing to do with creative usage of the work. Not quite as bad as -ND, though, which is somehow worse in that regard.