What does non-commercial mean?
Slashdot has an interesting discussion of a question I’ve often wondered about: What does non-commercial mean in a Creative Commons license? If your blog runs some ads, does that mean you can’t use a photo CC-ed for non-commercial use? CC-friendly BoingBoing is the possible offender in this case.
BoingBoing has removed the image to respect the author’s wishes, and has posted a brief notice acknowledging ambiguity about “non-commercial.” I think that’s the right way to handle it. But I’d love more clarity about this. I’d be fine with commercial entities using a photo I CC’ed, so long as they weren’t directly making money from it, because I think the culture of sharing is improved with that policy. But, it is a knottier problem than it would be if CC were more explicit about what the intended norms were for commercial use.
[Later that day:] Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing responded to my tweeting of the Slashdot discussion with three tweets:
Slashdot post is fake. Did you know the photographer is a flickr friend of @doctorow’s and namechecks him in the photo?
the post by the slashdot anonymous troll is NOT by the proprietor of the image. But by a troll.
They’re trolling because the very post was written by Cory, a longtime CC activist, & post said “I’m going offline for a month”
Thanks, Xeni
That’s a question that comes up a whole heck of a lot. Last year Creative Commons did a study assessing perceptions of what “noncommercial” means. Not sure if it will lead to more clarity, but it does flesh out the discussion:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Defining_Noncommercial
If anybody can answer that question, Lessig should be able.
I agree, it would be nice to get some real clarity on the meaning of ‘non-commercial’ re-use. I also agree with the sentiment that there is a difference between direct and indirect commercial re-use – I don’t think the current CC licenses accommodate that. An amateur blogger making a few dollars from google ads is also very different from a professional publishing venture running the same ads, but I’m not sure how you define that in an easy to understand CC license, particularly as Google themselves are a large, commercial enterprise (although, they do also provide a lot back to the Internet commons).