doi: 10.3897/zookeys.150.2189
Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial
condition: Implications for the re-use
of biodiversity information
Gregor Hagedorn1, Daniel Mietchen2, Robert A. Morris3, Donat Agosti4,
Lyubomir Penev5, Walter G. Berendsohn6, Donald Hobern7
1 Julius Kühn-Institute, Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants, Königin-Luise-Str. 19, 14195 Berlin, Germany 2 EvoMRI Communications, Zwätzengasse 10, 07743 Jena, Germany; Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, Prenzlauer Allee 217, 10405 Berlin; Germany, and Pensoft Publishers, 13a Geo Milev Str., Sofia, Bulgaria 3 Harvard University Herbaria and University of Massachusetts at Boston 4 Plazi, Zinggstr. 16, 3007 Bern, Switzerland 5 Bulgarian Academy of Sciences & Pensoft Publishers, Sofia, Bulgaria 6 Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum, Freie Universität Berlin, Königin-Luise-Straße 6-8, 14195 Berlin, Germany 7 Atlas of Living Australia, CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, GPO Box 1700, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia
Corresponding author: Gregor Hagedorn (g.m.hagedorn
gmail.com)
Citation: Hagedorn G, Mietchen D, Morris RA, Agosti D, Penev L, Berendsohn WG, Hobern D (2011) Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information. In: Smith V, Penev L (Eds) e-Infrastructures for data publishing in biodiversity science. ZooKeys 150: 127–149. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.150.2189
Abstract
The Creative Commons (CC) licenses are a suite of copyright-based licenses defining terms for the distribution and re-use of creative works. CC provides licenses for different use cases and includes open content licenses such as the Attribution license (CC BY, used by many Open Access scientific publishers) and the Attribution Share Alike license (CC BY-SA, used by Wikipedia, for example). However, the license suite also contains non-free and non-open licenses like those containing a “non-commercial” (NC) condition. Although many people identify “non-commercial” with “non-profit”, detailed analysis reveals that significant differences exist and that the license may impose some unexpected re-use limitations on works thus licensed. After providing background information on the concepts of Creative Commons licenses in general, this contribution focuses on the NC condition, its advantages, disadvantages and appropriate scope. Specifically, it contributes material towards a risk analysis for potential re-users of NC-licensed works.
Keywords
Creative Commons, Open Access, Open Content, Licensing, Non-profit, Open Educational Resources, Data Sharing, Software Licenses, Europeana
Copyright Gregor Hagedorn et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
