Page:Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition - Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information.pdf/15

Rh ing revenue streams to a project. This could in turn lead to an under-use of non-NC licenses, which realize far more value since there are projects (e.g., Wikipedia) that rely on free licenses to exist.”

The EU project ViBRANT (Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network for Taxonomy) is based on a combination of multiple platforms (Berendsohn et al. 2011). In its first years it recommended the use of a CC BY-NC-SA license on its Scratchpads web publication platform (Smith et al. 2009; Smith et al. this volume), the CC BY-SA license on the MediaWiki (biowikifarm, Hagedorn et al. 2010) platform, and CC BY (with major contributors choosing CC BY-NC-SA, however) on the CDM platform (Berendsohn 2010). The present paper is partly motivated by observing the resultant incompatibilities. For the future, contributors employing the ViBRANT Scratchpad 2 platform to be deployed in 2012 will be encouraged to use an open license. A CC BY license will be the default for new content, although users may choose other licenses, including those with a non-commercial clause.

Summary and conclusions

Creative Commons licenses are not antagonistic to copyright – they are based on it. A violation of a CC license is a copyright violation. CC licenses replace individual contracts (that the copyright owner and the user of a work may negotiate) with a standardized license. Managing individual licenses incurs a high legal and management overhead (which induces many publishers not to negotiate licenses, but rather to demand total transfer of copyright). The availability of a set of such standard contracts for a spectrum of use cases is an important feature of CC licenses.

The Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC NC) licenses exclude re-use scenarios leading to monetary profits or other commercial advantages (increased notability, etc.). It thus effectively protects copyright owners whose income depends on commercially licensing their works. NC licenses therefore are an important instrument to contribute a work to causes in which a third party’s gain does not diminish the revenue of the copyright holder. Contributing marketable works under an NC license is a laudable act.

Nevertheless, the NC licenses are also deceptive. The phrases “creative commons” and “non-commercial”, together with the strong tendency in colloquial language to (incorrectly) identify “commercial” with “profit” and “non-commercial” with “non-profit”, may suggest that releasing works under this license contributes to a “non-commercial commons” that is easily re-usable for all non-profit-minded entities. This, however, is not the case. NC licenses come at a high societal cost: they provide a broad protection for the copyright owner, but strongly limit the potential for re-use, collaboration and sharing in ways unexpected by many users:

1. While some interpretations plausibly argue that in public perception non-commercial and non-profit are widely seen as closely related, a public misconception is likely to be irrelevant in a court case. Most non-profit organizations or charities