Licensing patterns
The majority of large-scale global collaborative projects promote the use of “free” or “open content” licenses. Free and open are often used interchangeably, but we will use them here in the sense that free just means that accessing the information does not involve costs beyond those of accessing the web, whereas open shall refer to the absence of “non-commercial” and “no-derivative” conditions.
The distribution of the various CC licenses depends on the cultural and commercial context of the various communities. Statistics maintained by Creative Commons to record various license uses show that 60% of all CC-licensed works in 2010 (primarily from Flickr and Yahoo, Linksvayer 2011a) are under non-free CC licenses (with ND, NC condition). The proportion of open licenses is slowly increasing over the years, however (Linksvayer 2011a, b).
Within the context of biodiversity, the proportions of non-open licenses are similar. A quality control web service (Morris 2009) showed that 76% of nearly 95 000 CC-licensed images in the Flickr EoL Images Group (Flickr 2011) had NC licenses on them. However, the average for EoL may be different, since EoL had other media sources in addition to Flickr. For the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), 34 out of 58 CC licensed data sets include a non-commercial term (58,6%; 28 CC BY-NC, 6 CC BY-NC-SA, pers. comm. Miles Nicholls).
By contrast, a Google search reveals that among the PubMed Central corpus (U.S. National Library of Medicine 2011a), the open content CC BY license was chosen nearly three times as often as all NC licenses combined (Mietchen 2011).
The “Defining Noncommercial” report (Creative Commons Corporation & Netpop Research 2009) shows that the vast majority of copyright holders publishing works under a non-commercial license are willing to interpret the license in a liberal sense, e.g., accepting the use in combination with cost compensation or as advertisement by educational or non-profit organizations (see also Dobusch 2011). However, organizations planning to re-use NC-licensed works are a) forced to accept a legal litigation risk and b) are restricted due to license compatibility issues in the case of licenses containing the Share Alike condition. As a result, many public education projects like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Connexions, Encyclopedia of Earth Citizendium, WikiEducator, Appropedia, etc. have decided that NC licenses are not suitable for them. Non-open licenses like CC BY-NC-SA seem to dominate in terms of number of published items, whereas open content licenses (CC BY, CC BY-SA) may dominate in terms of re-use.
By their very nature, the severe constraints on NC-licensed works reduce the societal benefits arising from those works (Möller and Anonymous 2007ff). Non-commercial licenses do not create the same kind of synergistic, agile, collaborative environment or re-use and continuous improvement that open content licenses create.
At the Creative Commons Global Summit 2011, CC representative Mike Linksvayer stated (Linksvayer 2011b; Dobusch 2011): “… the NC condition still sounds very appealing to many creators and is thus probably overused by those without exist-
